By Yuki Ostrovsky | Actual Life Under Communism
For the record, I want it known that I was extremely online about this. I had the infographics. I had the reading lists. I had a carefully curated Pinterest board called "Cozy Commune Vibes ✨" featuring terracotta pots, communal bread ovens, and soft-focus photographs of people in linen shirts laughing over shared meals. I reposted that one quote about how "under communism, you can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner" roughly forty-seven times.
I did not, at any point, see a graphic about potato sorting.
The Dream: A Gentle Life of Collective Flourishing
My name is Briar Ashwood — well, it was Briar Ashwood, before the Committee on Names and Productive Identity suggested I go by Worker Unit 7741-F for administrative clarity — and until approximately eight months ago, I was a holistic wellness content creator with 34,000 Instagram followers and a Substack called Unraveling the Capitalist Body.
Photo: Briar Ashwood, via a.1stdibscdn.com
My content pillars were: nervous system regulation, anti-hustle philosophy, somatic healing, and what I described as "revolutionary rest." I charged $180 per session for crystal alignment consultations. I told people this was, in a very real sense, a political act.
I genuinely believed that the society I was agitating for would require my specific skills. Surely a post-capitalist world would need people to help the collective heal. To process intergenerational trauma. To hold space. I pictured myself in something flowing, facilitating circle discussions in a sunlit room, perhaps with a small herb garden visible through the window behind me.
The Central Planning Committee, as it turns out, had done some different math.
What the Pamphlets Left Out
The assignment letter arrived on a Tuesday. It was not delivered by a comrade with kind eyes. It was slid under my door by a man who did not make eye contact and was already walking away before I opened it.
Worker Unit 7741-F is hereby assigned to Facility 12, Volga District Potato Processing and Grading Station. Shift B: 05:00–17:00. Reporting date: Thursday.
Photo: Volga District, via dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com
I read it three times. Then I read it a fourth time in case I had somehow misunderstood what a potato processing facility was.
I had not.
I wrote back to the Committee explaining my qualifications: my 200-hour yoga teacher certification, my Level 2 Crystal Healing Practitioner badge, my extensive experience facilitating "grief circles" over Zoom. I attached my content portfolio. I used the phrase "my unique skill set" four times, which, in retrospect, was four times too many.
The response came in two sentences: The collective thanks you for your enthusiasm. Please report Thursday at 04:45 for orientation.
Orientation (A Word That Has Lost All Meaning)
Orientation was a twelve-minute video shown on a television bolted to a cinder block wall. It covered: proper glove usage, the correct angle for inspecting potatoes for rot, and what to do if the conveyor belt jams (do not attempt to fix it yourself; alert a supervisor; do not stop moving).
There was no section on setting intentions. There was no opening breathwork exercise. Nobody asked how we were arriving into the space.
I looked around the room at my fellow workers. A man to my left, who introduced himself only as Dmitri, had the thousand-yard stare of someone who had been here for two winters already. The woman to my right had brought her own knee brace. She put it on with the practiced efficiency of someone who has accepted, completely and without drama, what her life has become.
I thought about my Pinterest board. I thought about the linen shirts.
The Potatoes Are Not Interested in Your Healing Journey
Here is something nobody tells you about potato sorting: there is a rhythm to it, and the rhythm does not care about you. The belt moves. The potatoes come. You look, you sort, you look, you sort. Bad ones to the left. Good ones continue forward. Your opinions about this process are not a variable the system has accounted for.
By hour three on my first day, I had attempted to explain to Dmitri that what we were experiencing was "a form of capitalist muscle memory the revolution hadn't yet deprogrammed from our nervous systems."
Dmitri looked at me for a long moment.
"The belt is backing up," he said.
I looked down. The belt was backing up.
I sorted faster.
A Small Moment of Clarity (Disguised as a Bad Potato)
Somewhere around week three, holding a potato that had gone spectacularly wrong in some subterranean way that only revealed itself under the facility's fluorescent lights, I had a thought I wasn't entirely prepared for:
Someone has to do this.
Not me, specifically — I want to be clear that I remain deeply aggrieved about my assignment and have submitted two formal reallocation requests — but someone. The collective eats. The potatoes must be sorted. The people I had been posting infographics at for three years, the ones I privately considered insufficiently politically evolved, were sorting right alongside me. Dmitri. The woman with the knee brace, whose name is Galena and who is, objectively, much better at this than I am.
None of them had a Pinterest board. All of them had been doing the actual work the whole time.
I'm not saying I've had a full ideological conversion. I'm saying the potatoes gave me a lot of time to think.
Where Things Stand
My third reallocation request — in which I proposed the establishment of a Committee on Collective Emotional Wellbeing, to be chaired by me, operating out of a room with natural light — was returned with a single handwritten note in the margin:
We will keep this on file.
They will not keep this on file.
I still believe in the principles. I still believe in the vision. I just wish, with increasing urgency, that someone had put a single potato in one of those infographics. One potato. That's all I'm asking. Just so I would have known it was coming.
Shift B starts in four hours. My gloves are by the door.
Briar Ashwood — Worker Unit 7741-F — is a former holistic wellness content creator currently employed at Facility 12, Volga District. Her Substack has been reassigned to the Bureau of Approved Literature.