Document 104

Letter from P. G. Shatrov to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta on benefits of Soviet rule, 1938

RGAE, f. 396, op. 10, d. 13, ll. 334-335ob. Original manuscript.

I will discribe. When I was six-seven years old I was babysitting with my younger brother and sisters. When I got bigger eight-nine years old I began to help out my housework. Then my father gave me [crossed out] hired me out to a rich peasant I. M. Vlasov for summer work so I worked him for two years, I harrowed and so on. In one summer I earned two poods of oats from him plus meals. In those days there were no metal plows, everybody worked the land with the old plows and wooden harrows. We would mow the whole day with nothing but sickles at a slant. We harvested everything in our arms. The rich peasants made to help, they gathered people to harvest with their arms. They harvest all day and for a long time a month at night. When they get drunk the drunkerds harvest fast and they start cutting their arms, almost just about everybody mutalates their arms.

Our locality was very much under the influence of religion. We had this kind of religion -- old men would come around. The old men are yung and old, they are called by the teknical name sectarians. They preached. They told of a whole lot of different sins: smoking tobacco, dancing and singing songs. Whoever had a samovar, they would not visit them, that was a sin too. They talked about you couldnt count how many sins. Ther will be a special punishment from god in the next world for thees sins: some people will burn in hellfire, some will sit among the wurms, some will boil in tar. One side will burn, the other will gro. They talked most of all about how the anticrist will walk upon the earth and put a stamp on people. This means they will be given Soviet vacsine.

At that time the contagious disease smallpox was very common. This disease did away with people, especially the little ones. Whoever would remain alive, if they did, would be covered with skratches, their whole faces covered with pockmarks. Whoever remained alive was called lucky.

Soviet authority began to take care of people, they started coming to the villages to vacsinate them, to protect them from death and mutalation.

One day a doctor came to our village from the hospital to vacsinate people. So our parents hid almost just about everybody wherever they could, but I was a little bigger, so I got on my skis and took off to the woods, and I came very close to freezing.

There was one mor insident. I was already in school. Suddenly a vaksinater arrived and everybody scattered. I took off to the village and hid in a pile of straw, and my comrade, even though the school was 3 km away from us, took off in winter in nothing but his underwear.