Oddly enough, Soviet Union had a thing similar to "Kimchi Harvest". I remember workers in my town having to go work at a collective farm for a week harvesting things.

They also had something called "subotnik", aka voluntary Saturday labor. This was a practice where citizens, including workers and students, participated in unpaid labor on Saturdays. These activities included various tasks like cleaning up the city (that's what I remember doing as a kid). There was nothing "voluntary" about it.

It was still the norm in Uzbekistan until just a few years ago, but with cotton instead of potatoes. Not anymore AFAIK.

I really appreciate anecdotes like that. As I've gotten older, I've wanted to understand a lot of the details about what makes life in Communist countries ... frustrating.

IE, in school we only had a superficial explanation of what communism is; it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I understood the whole "cult of personality" thing.

Gimjang week is pretty common in SK as well, especially among the elders

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimjang

All the photos seem to have broken links, but for some of them you can get their direct link and remove the "-scaled" part to get a higher resolution. Not for the Kimchi one though.