We drove along the seashore, and then up through a cleft in the green mountains into a back valley, where the lines of dark green tea bushes stretched for miles, and here and there were groves of orange trees. It was a lovely piece of country, and it was the first state farm we had visited.

Here again we cannot make generalities, we can only tell what we saw and what we were told. The state farm was run like an American corporation. It had its manager, and its board of directors, and its employees. The farm workers lived in apartment houses, new, and clean, and pleasant. Each family had its own apartment, and if the women worked in the fields, there were crèches for their children to stay in. And they had the same status as people who worked in factories.

It was a very large farm, with its own schools and its own orchestras. The manager was a businesslike man, who might easily have been a manager of a branch factory of an American company. It was very different from the collective farms, for in the latter each farmer has a share in the profits of the collective. This was simply a factory for growing tea.

The men worked with the conditioning of the land. Tea-picking was done mostly by the women, for their fingers were clever. The women moved across the field in long lines, and they sang and talked as they worked, and they were very pictorial. Capa took a great many pictures of them. And here, as everywhere, there were decorations for proficiency. There was one girl who had won a medal for her speed in picking tea, and her hands worked like lightning over the tea bushes, picking the fresh light green leaves and putting them in the basket she carried. The dark green of the tea bushes and the color of the women’s clothes made a very pretty scene on the hillside. At the bottom of the hill there was a truck to receive the fresh picked tea and take it to the processing plant.

We followed the truck to the tea factory, which is worked entirely by automatic machinery. Macerators bruise the tea and let it oxidize, and endless belts go through the drying ovens. The factory is operated almost entirely by women. The director is a woman, and the tasters. Women work the machines where the tea is macerated and oxidized, and women tend the big ovens where the tea is dried. Women grade and pack it. The only men are those who move the crates of packaged tea.

The director of the plant, a handsome woman of about forty-five, is a graduate of an agricultural school in her specialty. And her factory puts out many grades of tea, from the finest small top leaves to the bricks of tea which are sent out to Siberia. And since tea is the most important beverage of the Russian people, the tea gardens and the tea factories are considered one of the most important industries of the region.