Document 116

Letter from kolkhoz chairman P. P. Sergeev to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta on his persecution, 23 January 1938

RGAE, f. 396, op. 10, d. 110, ll. 96-101ob. Original manuscript.

To Krest'ianskaia Gazeta

Statement

I hereby request that the following be taken up for consideration. My year of birth was 1887 I am the son of a (middle) peasant. My father was enslaved his whole life by neighboring kulaks unable to escape bondage under the Davydkin brothers, who forced him to work for entire months for a pood of flour and it went on this way his whole life until he died. I became a farmhand at the age of eleven. In 1900 I found myself in Moscow under a rich boss named Artamonov in Gruziny on Kondrat'ev Lane and worked there all the way until 1904. In 1904 due to illness I went to the countryside and my illness lasted until 1906, and in 1906 I went back to Moscow for work. In 1909 I was called up for military service and served in the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Amur in the 4th East Siberian infantry regiment, where I met Sergei Yermolaevich Suvorov, who had refused to serve military service and had been in prison, which I paid serius attention to. I had thoughts before this: why am I serving, what for and who am I serving? After that I had occasion to read some broshures by Tolstoi that denounced the church, priests and landowners. I decided to write a letter to L. N. Tolstoy. Tolstoy quickly answered me, where he confirmed my thoughts even more. Upon returning from military service, I again found myself in Moscow, where I went to work at a vegetarian cafeteria as a doorman. After working at the cafeteria for a year, we established a farming artel outside Tula at the village of Khmelyok. The artel soon broke up because of harassment from the tsarist authorities and we were persecuted and subjected to frequent searches by the police. I went back to the cafeteria, and in 1914 war was declared, and mobilization was announced I went into hiding in Siberia. I felt that an imperialist war would not be of any benefit to us and I thought it was unnecessary, even harmful, to defend the tsars, landowners and kulaks [Omitted is a section describing his jobs and contacts in Siberia during the war.]. After the revolution I returned to Moscow again and worked in a children's colony at the Chuchkovo station (the children's colony was attached to a factory). Some time later I left for the countryside with my whole family, where I have been farming to this day. When I arrived in the countryside I set up a village reading room, and for two years I was a librarian and got involved with the land question. The settlement of Glubki, where I used to live, had a very poor life and was located far from the fields. I broke up all the land into four sections with new settlements, and in 1931 I was elected chairman of the Lenin Kolkhoz and a member of the Grachevsky Village Soviet as chairman of the field-crop section, where I worked until 7 December 1937. On 7 December I was ousted as [kolkhoz] chairman (seventy five percent of the kolkhoz chairmen in our raion were removed in 1937, and nobody was given any reasons for it), and on 13 January 1938 I was expelled from the kolkhoz (but I am still a member of the village soviet) by stirring up the public [against me] as a sectarian, wrecker and enemy of the people by a resolution of the general meeting of kolkhoz farmers. The kolkhoz had a total of forty five members, and only nineteen attended the meeting. I consider this action both by chairman Yeliseev of the Grachevsky Village Soviet and the meeting of kolkhoz farmers to be a mockery and persecution of a living human being. This only plays into the hands of the enemies of the people, I consider it wrong. Under the agricultural statutes of the artel any expulsion from the kolkhoz requires two thirds to be present, and only nineteen out of forty were present. Second it is not according to Stalin's Constitution.

I don't belong to the sectarians anyway, and I have been and am the most mortal enemy of any fonaticism [sic]. I began to fight against this trend myself back in 1909. I see the word god itself as an invention by the priests and the dirty bourgeois and so on. This served their purpose so they could fleece the working people better and keep the masses in the dark. I declare once again that I do not believe in any gods or any lackeys of the bourgeoisie. In the old days, i.e. before the war, I even had to take gibes from fellow villagers and neighbors, they called me an antichrist and godless.

My struggle during my time as kolkhoz chairman. In 1932 a gang of thieves was organized in our area, and they hid in the woods, about twelve of them. They stole the property of kolkhozes, sovkhozes and kolkhoz farmers. In our former Novosil' Raion they stole a lot of cows and all kinds of property. I was the first to decide to fight, I reported to Novosil'--an investigation corner still existed there at the time [The letter writer interprets ugrozysk (ugolovnyi rozysk), in this case a criminal investigation department, in a most peculiar way as "ugol rozyska" (investigation corner or desk)] --I fought for a full two years and in the end defeated this gang: some of them were locked up again, and some escaped. At the time they wanted to shoot me. I reported this more than once, but they didn't pay much attention to my calls for help. Later I also exposed two kolkhoz farmers for stealing state property. In court they messed up the case. The two brothers each got six months at forced labor to be served at the kolkhoz, and I also exposed two kolkhoz farmers for stealing potatoes on the Rusty Marsh sovkhoz farm. They each got one year at forced labor and one had to be present during dekulakization. All these people are now living on our kolkhoz. And on 18 June 1937 I wrote a report on Stefan Ivanovich Davydkin about a counterrevolutionary act: he referred to Comrade Stalin by all kinds of derogatory names in the presence of the following individuals first V. M. Glotov, Yegor S. Kochergin, St. Yegor. Gorokhov, V. Pav. Savina and Ivan Serg. Glotov, and previously this citizen was making statements during road construction, corrupting other kolkhoz farmers. This matter is still being worked on, and that is where the whole struggle started against me and so did all kinds of persecution of me. More than once I was subjected to all sorts of repressions and threats, they threatened to cause me trouble in kolkhoz work. More than one time there was a work stoppage. I have sent alarm signals to the raion about all of the outrages that are taking place, but to this day nobody has wanted to help me and nobody has paid any attention. Our kolkhoz, village soviet and the raion have received very few visits, and nobody has wanted to know what life on our kolkhoz is like, and I have been left helpless to my own devices for a full six years, so I request that you pay serius attention to the foregoing and I feel that I alone may be wiped off the face of the earth, so I request your intervention and get to the heart of the matter and give me assistance and sort things out on a fair basis.

23 January 1938.