SOAP

— About ten years ago it was, I suppose, we had … oh what are they called… shortages. All the manufactured items started to disappear, and factories couldn't provide people with even the most basic things. At that time I was working in the slaughter room of a factory farm as a production engineer, and I had to wash my hands quite often because I was handling food a lot. They didn't really supply us with soap. But you can't just shut down the manufacturing process. So I had to use my head, and I remembered when I used to work at the Orsk meat processing plant. They used to make the soap they used there themselves. And so I thought I could give it a go myself (...) I got the things I needed together, figured out the correct doses, and the soap turned out to be of pretty decent quality. It lathers and washes off dirt and grime pretty well. I made that soap in pretty primitive conditions, on an electric stove in an enamel bucket. I made quite a lot; there were twenty people in the slaughtering section and one lot was enough for a week. So, I sorted us out, and it was like there was no soap shortage for our slaughter room. The factory managers found out about it and started ordering soap for the whole factory, which I made the same way. I tried to make sure the poultry women had soap too. I started to cut it into pieces (...) The ingredients needed to make this soap were very simple. You use some animal fat — any kind will do, pig, beef fat, stuff that we used to add to the bird food at the plant. We didn't need to go looking for it. And lye, which we used to use to disinfecting the place. The exact proportions I can't remember. I boiled that soap on the stove at the plant, in our section.