The author, at right, with fellow university students, picking potatoes. Photograph: Aleksandr Golovkin

Being sent to assist the rural population with the collection of agricultural crops was a common experience of Soviet studenthood—and also of life in Soviet cities. Throughout my childhood, my father and his fellow researchers at the Academy of Medical Sciences would spend two or three autumn weeks outside Moscow, helping collective farmers. The agricultural dispatches stopped for my father after we became refuseniks in 1979—when my parents applied for and were refused emigration and lost their academic jobs. As a rank-and-file Soviet physician in a local health center, my father was so needed that the potato-picking ceased to be mandatory. For Moscow University juniors, however, the fall semester started almost a month late. We contributed virtually free labor to the Soviet agricultural economy.

The colloquial expression in Soviet Russian was to be sent na kartoshku (literally, “for potatoes”), although the nature of the crops changed, depending on climate and location. In the spring of 1993, when I was doing Nabokov research in Prague, I was surprised to learn from a Czech woman my age that in the Eastern Bloc days she, too, had been sent on agricultural works. Except the students in Prague were mainly used to pick hops, an agent in brewing beer. “Therein lies all the difference,” I remember saying to her.

Chashnikovo, where the university had a summer campus, was located about 30 miles north of Moscow. Although considered a small town (selo) because it had a school (and once had a church), it was really a village with geese ambling along the unpaved streets. In the fall of 1986 Chashnikovo was a sorry sight. Protracted rains, common in Central Russia in September, had turned dirt roads into sleeves of mud. The barracks where we stayed had no heat and were made of plywood, and there was no way to read except with a flashlight. Roofs leaked and windows were missing glass panes.

To most of us the place seemed like a penal colony without strict work enforcement. Not the tired Soviet motivational mottos like “To fulfill and overfulfill the norm!” but pot-boiling and time-passing were the bywords of the day. We were paid some fantastically low wage per unit of “workday.” Only a few of my fellow students—the army veterans from rural areas of the country—preferred the manual chores to studying, worked with verve, and opted for overtime.

Our workweek, like the school week, consisted of six days, with Sunday off. The day started with some bronchial song of labor enthusiasm blaring from the loudspeaker, with gruel and tasteless tea at the refectory, and the daily lineup and head count. Then we would trudge through muck to one of the naked, flooded fields surrounding the Chashnikovo campus. Most days we were harvesting potatoes or carrots. A tractor would plough a row across the field, and a group of us would follow with buckets, picking up some of the crop and stomping what remained under the surface of the thin clayish soil. Sometimes we left the smaller tubers and roots for the local population to prey on after dusk. This was a student operation, and there was practically no local supervision. I remember once or twice being called “lazy city sons of bitches” by a bristly manager yelling from the cab of his pickup truck. I slacked off as inventively as I knew how. At some point I arranged for a doctor’s note documenting an acute attack of hay fever and recommending bed rest. The weeks of potato-picking are a blur of sunless days and drenching rains.

By the end of each day, our Chashnikovo-issued quilted jackets and pants would be heavy with water and mud. At night, we would leave our boots and wet, dirty clothes in a small communal room with heaters, and when they were dry, the clay-splattered pants and coats would stand on their own like petrified life-size puppets. In the morning we would have to break them apart from their hardened embraces.

There was heat only in the central cottage with its community room, TV set, and telephone line, on which we could receive but not make calls. One evening, I entered the community room and saw a group of my classmates, mostly girls, glued to the TV screen. “What’s on?” I asked but only got “hush, be quiet” in response. It was a regular TV show, The Camera Faces the World, something of a Soviet cross between ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 60 Minutes. As my luck would have it, the show’s host announced that Soviet viewers would have the opportunity to see a re-broadcast of an American documentary titled The Russians Are Here. (The title must have been a play on Norman Jewison’s film of 1966, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.) The host explained that the documentary had been released in the United States (in 1983) and focused on the lives of those who had left the Soviet Union and settled in America. He added that several years after the documentary’s release a Soviet TV crew had located some of the émigrés featured in the film and interviewed them for the show. These interviews, the host said, would serve as a tacit commentary on the “hollow” (I think this was the epithet he employed) lives of the “former Soviet citizens in emigration.”

I must have been the only one in that room full of university students who had heard of the PBS documentary prior to its showing on Soviet television. I had learned about it from the letters of my parents’ friends living in America. After it was first shown on PBS, the film had generated protest among Soviet émigrés. One friend living in Washington, D.C., even enclosed a clipping from a New York Russian daily. The émigrés found particularly objectionable the film’s portrayal of them as being unable to integrate and assimilate, as being somehow unappreciative of the “freedoms” and “values” of American society. And now before me, unfolding on the screen, were scenes of Jewish-Soviet immigrants suspended between a Soviet past and American present. The documentary featured an interview with Lev Khalif, a poet who had been a friend of my father’s in 1960s Moscow before emigrating in the 1970s. Khalif stated that in the Soviet Union at least the KGB was reading his work, whereas in the United States, nobody did. This portrait of a Russian poet in America, unwanted, dejected, deprived of his readers, was particularly jarring to me, considering that Khalif was my father’s peer. I haven’t seen the documentary since 1986, but I do remember clearly that in its tenor the American film was disdainful of “the Russians.”

So there I was, a refusenik hiding beneath the tattered facade of a regular Soviet student relaxing after a day of work in the fields of his motherland. There were about 25 of us in the community room, and several of my female classmates openly wept when the camera showed old women crying over a Soviet movie they watched in a darkened living room in Brooklyn. My classmates’ tears were unforced and spontaneous. The propaganda was working, I could see it for myself. See how miserable our former citizens are abroad, the television was saying. As the show rolled on, gazes of pity were turned toward me, the only Jew in the room. I didn’t return the innocent, tearful looks. I just sat there in the community room, sipping sweet tea and pretending I had no idea what they were about. Jewish emigration? No idea. Refuseniks? Who would those be? Brighton Beach? Whatever. Doubly the double life.

Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College. His essay is drawn and adapted from his latest book, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Copyright © 2013 by Maxim D. Shrayer), which was a finalist for the 2013 National Jewish Book Award.