Document 105

Letter from M. Matiukhin to Kalinin on conditions in his home district, 16 December 1932

RGASPI, f. 78, op. 1, d. 430, ll. 45-46. Original manuscript.

In July I visited my home region, whose fields I have not roamed for many, many years. I covered about sixty to eighty square kilometers on foot. I went to the settlement where I was born, I went to the village where I grew up until the age of fifteen, I visited the village where I was a farmhand for two summers. I roamed around the settlements and villages where I used to collect food for myself and my family forty years ago in the name of Christ. I will not try to convince you how skimpy the kolkhoz and sovkhoz fields are and how sickeningly barren the so-called suburban fields are, or how hard to get through the main roads are. But now the figures show that they are the most convincing arguments. Thirty seven years ago, leaving the village for the Briansk plant, the thirty five farmsteads in the village of Popov-Klinok had sixty to sixty five work horses, thirty five to forty cows, there were more than a hundred one, two and three year old foals and calves, and about 250-300 sheep and pigs. The landowner Leonov had twenty five to thirty horses and the same number of cows on his farmstead. In July when I asked the villagers how many horses they had, the reply was twenty seven, and about thirty cows. They had no young of either animal . . . .

My home region is a producer of hemp. Hemp is a plant half again as high as you or me. That is, the way the hemp was thirty seven years ago. Now I saw unprocessed hemp three quarters of a meter [thirty inches] high. Maybe a meter, but no more. Thirty seven years ago you would never see unprocessed hemp in July. By the feast of Nicholas and no later the entire hemp crop would be at the merchants' shops in the city of Briansk. Two poods of hemp were equal to a pair of sixteen-vershok [twenty eight-inch-high] boots.

When I asked whose blackened hemp that was in the mud, the reply was it belonged to the Goritsky kolkhoz farmers, and we independent peasants turned in ours on a contracting basis at eight rubles a pood.