Gallery Work and Recreation

The south-eastern gallery shows grain harvest on the local fields. Working on kolkhoz fields was always a complicated and demanding task. Harvesting was called nothing less than “the battle for the harvest”. When we buy bread at the store, we often do not contemplate how hard and demanding it was to make the bread. Bread is the first and the foremost concern of the agricultural worker. Grain growers have developed their skills and expertise in raising grains for ages. Harvesting days are hard. All the people, the whole nation live and breathe harvesting without losses and within a short time, preserving it. Over and over again, the July sun rises in the morning, cherishing and warming Mother Earth, and the vast Don fields spread before your eyes, where grain growers literally have a battle for the harvest. The golden “sea” with its gentle waves disappears beyond the horizon, and the powerful “steppe ships” - Niva combine harvesters are gracefully shipping the fields, greedily swallowing full-weight grain ears. It is harvesting. Grain trucks are going in a column. On the thrashing floor, a cleared foot-worn plot of land, where grains were thrashed, milled and sorted, we see hard-working women throwing grains on a grain-thrashing machine. It is a final stage of fruitful work of the whole agricultural period.

And next to the picture of harvesting, there is a famous comic scene from the novel Virgin Soil Upturned by M.A. Sholokhov, when Grandpa Shchukar gave a soup with frogs to the kolkhoz people. Accidentally, he spooned up a frog of the river. Finding excuses for the furious villagers, he started saying that it was a special master’s delicacy, which used to be served for the upper crust. “An oyster. I’m talking good Russian to you!... General Filimonov used to swallow hundreds of them even on an empty stomach. Generals liked them, and maybe I cooked it on purpose for you fools, put it in for flavoring…” Shchukar found excuses. Nevertheless, these tales raised the class ire of the former Red Army soldiers, who did not want to eat general’s dainties. And the hapless cooker had to flee from them for safety.

The other part of the wall contains scenes of Rostovites recreating on the bank of the Don River.

If you leave the underpass in the direction to Beregovaya Street, down to the Don River, on the side of the Central Market, there is a mosaic picture with direction signs for objects located next to the underpass. There are directions to trams, buses and trolleybuses. It is a rare case when you see the name Engels Street in Rostov – now it has the former name of Bolshaya Sadovaya Street.