My Five-Year Vision Board Said 'Healing Facilitator.' The State Said 'Beet Technician.'
By Yuki Ostrovsky | Actual Life Under Communism
Let me paint you a picture of who I was in 2023. I was twenty-four years old, I owned three different editions of The Communist Manifesto (one annotated, one aesthetically plain for photographs, one given to me as a gift that I hadn't read), and I had a color-coded Notion board titled "My Role in the New Society." The board had sections. It had tags. The primary tag, applied to forty-seven separate entries, read: Collective Wellness Coordinator.
I had a Masters degree in Expressive Arts Therapy from a university whose name you would recognize and whose tuition you would wince at. My thesis was called "Decolonizing the Drum Circle: Toward a Liberated Somatic Practice in Post-Capitalist Community Spaces." My supervisor called it "ambitious." My mother called it "a lot of words." The Central Planning Committee, when they eventually reviewed my skills assessment form, apparently called it nothing at all, because the box marked "Relevant Industrial Application" was left entirely blank.
The revolution, when it came, was administratively faster than I expected.
The Skills Assessment Form Was Not What I Had Imagined
I had pictured something more... conversational. Perhaps a panel. Perhaps someone would ask about my philosophy of care, my approach to group trauma processing, whether I preferred morning or afternoon for community check-ins. Instead, there was a form. The form had seventeen questions. Fourteen of them concerned physical fitness, prior agricultural experience, and tolerance for cold weather. One asked about "any skills related to machinery operation or root vegetable cultivation." One was administrative. The final question — and I want to be precise here — asked me to estimate, in kilograms, how much weight I could carry over flat terrain for a sustained period.
I wrote "emotional labor is also labor" in the margin.
They did not find this helpful.
Collective Farm No. 7: A Yelp Review
While I waited for my reassignment paperwork, I found that several former comrades had already begun leaving reviews of their new postings on a grey-market platform the Committee had not yet successfully blocked. In the spirit of journalistic integrity, I am reproducing a selection here.
Photo: Collective Farm No. 7, via infinitecraftrecipe.com
⭐☆☆☆☆ "Cafeteria — Collective Farm No. 7, Eastern Agricultural Zone" Posted by: former_content_strategist_pdx
Photo: Eastern Agricultural Zone, via ponicslife.com
"The broth is technically broth in the sense that water was involved at some point. I asked if there was a gluten-free option and the serving comrade stared at me for so long I began to feel I was the problem. The ambiance is a long grey room with a portrait of a man who appears to have never smiled. Two stars removed for the absence of oat milk. One star removed for the presence of a motivational poster that reads PRODUCTION IS LOVE. Would not return but am contractually unable to leave."
⭐⭐☆☆☆ "Accommodation Block C — Collective Farm No. 7" Posted by: manifestation_coach_turned_beet_harvester
"The bunk is functional. My roommates include a former podcast host, a UX designer who keeps crying quietly, and a man named Grigori who has been here since the previous system and seems fine. Grigori is the only one sleeping well. I have started asking Grigori questions. Grigori does not answer but his eyes communicate something I am not ready to process. Three stars for the window, which faces east and gets morning light. One star removed because the morning begins at 4:45am."
What They Don't Tell You in the Discord Server
Here is something the revolutionary theory channels never quite addressed: central planning is, at its mechanical core, a logistics operation. And logistics operations are interested in outputs. Tonnes of grain. Metres of pipe. Kilowatts of electricity. The revolution did not, as it turns out, have a line item for trauma-informed community dialogue or embodied grief ritual or my particular speciality, which I described on my skills form as "holding space for collective nervous system regulation."
I had imagined myself in something like a yurt. Soft lighting. A singing bowl. A circle of comrades who had just finished their shifts and needed someone to guide them through a body scan.
The reality is that after a ten-hour shift pulling beets from soil that seems to have a personal grievance against human hands, my comrades do not want a body scan. They want to sit down. They want the grey broth. They want Grigori to say something, anything, just once.
I tried, on my third week, to initiate a somatic check-in before the evening meal. I asked everyone to place one hand on their chest and notice what they were feeling.
A woman named Darya, who had formerly been a brand partnerships manager at a wellness startup, looked at me with an expression I can only describe as ancient.
"I feel beets," she said.
She was not wrong.
A Note on Manifestation Under Centralized Resource Allocation
I want to be careful here, because I still believe in the principles. I do. But I will say this gently, to any current comrades still updating their vision boards in the soft glow of a laptop screen: the universe, much like the Committee, does not negotiate with aesthetics. You cannot manifest an exemption from agricultural quotas. The beets do not care about your attachment style. And a color-coded Notion board, however lovingly constructed, does not constitute a skill that is legible to anyone holding a clipboard and a tonnage target.
My board still exists, theoretically, on a server somewhere. The tag Collective Wellness Coordinator applied to forty-seven entries.
I have started a new tag.
It says: Beet Technician, Year One.
Grigori saw me updating it yesterday evening. He looked at the screen for a long moment.
Then — and I want to be clear that this is the first time — he smiled.
I think that counts as a somatic win.
Yuki Ostrovsky writes about the gap between revolutionary theory and agricultural practice. She is based, currently and involuntarily, in the Eastern Agricultural Zone. Her thesis is available upon request. No one has requested it.