**BARN * *

If there was a street fight and a boy had to flee, he had to run at least to his bathhouse, at least to get to the barn. Fervour of the pursuers soon waned - so tremendous and indisputable was the protective force of home, the nest. Under its protection, the escapee gained confidence in their abilities. The pursuer would lose his aggressiveness once he walked into the stranger's property.
At the same time, to a traveller with a good cause, the house was wide open even after the dark. Not everybody had a barn, but everyone wanted to build it. In the barn was kept the main wealth of the peasant family: bread, linen, leather (raw and dressed), in the winter meat carcasses and frozen fish - purchased and caught. In some barns, there were canvases and clothes. Grain filled the granaries, flax seeds stored in bags and wooden containers.
Sometimes barns were built on stilts to save seed from mice; there were barns with two floors. Barns had a double roof with shingles and boards. Internal locks and iron-clad doors were standard.
 In the village Timonikha in pre-kolkhoz time, a public granary was kept in the peasant mutual help fund. In the event of a disaster, society helped victims. Taking and giving grain, the storekeeper measured using a wooden container and levelled the top with a distinctive curved stick. When receiving, the stick was levelled grain with the hump up, and when giving was with the hump down. The difference was for the maintenance of the storekeeper, the shrinkage, outage and mice. The collective farm weighed grain on the rope scales with selected weight stones - substitutes for metal weights.
In Yuletide, adolescents and young women ran at midnight to their barns and pressed their cheeks against the freezing wall. They listened to what happened behind the wall. If you hear the rustle of pouring grain means that it will be a good harvest, and hence the wealth ... A few who didn't have enough mind and heart saw this as only a superstition.