Document 122

Letter from A. I. Poluektov to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta on his life and Dzerzhinsky kolkhoz, Voronezh Oblast, 10 November 1938

RGAE, f. 396, op. 10, d. 19, ll. 189-195ob. Original manuscript.

More than a year ago has passed [sic] since I wrote a letter to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta about our achievements in agriculture in 1937. The editors answered me, thanked me for the letter and asked me to write more about the good, as well as the bad, which must be rooted out, but I just did not dare to answer you until now for the following reason: I, Andrei Ivanovich Poluektov, am a member of the Dzerzhinsky Kolkhoz in Losevo Raion, Voronezh Oblast working at present as head of the laboratory-hut [an agronomy station, typically run by nonprofessionals, for preparing seeds for sowing and disseminating information and propaganda among kolkhoz farmers] and biolaboratory. First I will describe the capacity of our kolkhoz to you, and then the reason for my silence. In the middle of 1929 our kolkhoz was established by Red Army men who had come from Briansk Gubernia and who served in the city of Voronezh in the Dzerzhinsky Commune, which included the little village of Tumanovka, as it was called under the landowner Tushnev, with fifty five to sixty farmsteads, and the neighboring village of Livenka three km away, where the village soviet is located, with 1,500 farmsteads. But when the flood waters receded in the spring of 1930 all of the neighboring villages dropped out and all that remained in the Dzerzhinsky Commune was the little village of Tumanovka, along with the Red Army men's five families. In addition, each Red Army man brought in his relatives from Briansk and [so] there were twelve families. The aforesaid commune in the village of Tumanovka occupied the land area of former landowner I. D. Tushnev, of which there was 650 hectares and thirty three hectares of fruit gardens, plus twenty nine hectares of barren land. In addition, there were the farmsteads of the landowners Mazurin and Sviridov, whose land was in other locations, as well as a forest, which after the revolution was added to the Shipovsky Forestry Management Enterprise. The area of the commune itself is situated next to the Shipovsky Forest, famous for its shipbuilding wood, borders the commune on three sides, except for the western side from the village of Livenka, in 1931 four families [came in] from the raion center, the settlement of Losevo, and in 1932 five families came from other raions, so in 1933 there were already more than 120 families. Most of the arable land is flat, consists of black soil and is fertile, and there is also twenty hectares of dry-valley meadowland and 2 hectares of wooded shrubbery.

With regard to socialized livestock, commune members and the commune have established these animal-husbandry sections: a commercial dairy farm with seventy five cows, a hog-breeding farm with a hundred hogs, a sheep-breeding farm with 150 sheep, a commercial beekeeping farm with two hundred bee colonies and sixty five horses. In 1931, structures socialized by the commune members on a completely new site were used to build a fine stable for one hundred horses, a cowshed for 120 cows, a pigpen for 150 hogs, a winter apiary for 150 colonies, twelve storehouses, a grain-milling facility, a hulling mill and a mechanical creamery that was driven by a motor from which a dynamo electrically illuminated an office, a school, a club, a dormitory for 20 families and all of the livestock-breeding farms. The club had a standard film projector, there was also a brickyard that produced up to 200,000 burned bricks, a fruit dryer, a greenhouse for growing early vegetables, and there was also a breeding farm that yielded 25,000-30,000 roots a year of fruit seed stock, which contained the best varieties of apples and peaches. Recently they have also developed Michurin varieties, of which there are more than two hundred apple-tree roots.

In 1934 the commune converted to the statutes of the agricultural artel, after which all of the kolkhoz farmers who had arrived were each allotted half a hectare of vegetable gardens, and for those who were still socializing their structures, the kolkhoz used its own funds to build houses as well on the newly formed street. In this manner the kolkhoz doubled its size during the collectivization period. In addition to the foregoing, there were also three Fordson tractors [a reference to tractors produced at Leningrad's Red Putilovets factory between 1931 and 1934. Designed by engineers from the Ford Motor Company, the tractors were officially known as Fordson-Putilovets (FP).], three engines of ten, twelve, and eighteen horsepower and a complex thresher. When the MTS was established, the commune turned in one engine, three tractors and a thresher.

Thus, for the eight years of collectivization the kolkhoz has consisted of the following: 140 families, seventy five horses, forty five cows, twenty head of young cattle, eighteen pairs of working bulls, two hundred sheep, 120 hogs, 250 bee colonies, two hundred chickens plus a hundred cows at the personal disposal of kolkhoz farmers, 150 sheep, five hundred chickens, 120 hogs and twelve bee colonies--in short, the kolkhoz became Bolshevik, and its farmers became prosperous. This was in fact because the kolkhoz actually placed first in all of the raion's campaigns throughout the years of collectivization, but in 1938 our kolkhoz ran last in the raion in all of its operations. It would seem from the economic position of our kolkhoz as described above that there is nowhere we kolkhoz farmers would rather live, but in point of fact the exact opposite is true.

What on earth were the factors that slowed down the favorable economic growth of our kolkhoz? The reasons were as follows:

1. From the very early days of the commune's establishment and to this day the hostility has continued unabated between the old residents of the village of Tumanovka, who saw three families dekulaked and exiled during collectivization and whose closest relatives remained, and the new families that arrived and established the commune. They often hurl abuse at each other, and the old-timers say: "The devil must have brought you here, if it hadn't been for you, there wouldn't even be a kolkhoz here," so the new residents tell the old-timers: "This isn't your landowner Tushnev who you worshipped like God and stole whatever you wanted from him."

The Dzerzhinsky Kolkhoz was ethnically Russian and the founders of the commune were ethnic Russians. We Ukrainians had four families that arrived from the settlement of Losevo and to this day we are called "khokhly" [a derogatory term for Ukrainians, derived from the word for "topknot," a reference to the Cossack hair style--Trans.], despite the fact that while the Voronezh NKVD was still acting as patron of the commune in its early days, an NKVD representative said at a general meeting of all kolkhoz farmers that ethnic dissension on a kolkhoz is harmful, but it still continues to this day. "You khokhly, the devil made you come here," some kolkhoz farmers say. In addition, the new street which has been settled by about sixty farmsteads, has been named May Day Street, but the old-timers of the village of Tumanovka never call it by that name, but have dubbed it "Devil's Horn" and in every conversation that is all we hear: "Devil's Horn," Let's go to Devil's Horn" and so forth.

2. Since 1933 there has been no suitable person for the job of chairman, which has seen four people come and go, and all of them were self-suppliers, kept toadies and embezzlers around them, etc. Take the following conduct as an example. In 1933 chairman V. Ye. Kuznetsov was ousted by the raion organizations for the fact that he rode to the apiary on a trotter horse and the bees there stung it to death. In 1934 another [chairman] M. D. Rusanov this one started to do some hard drinking and go around to different women. The MTS politotdel [politicheskii otdel (political department)] ousted him too, and after Rusanov the raion organizations also appointed G. I. Boiko, who seemed to be all right as a manager, but his personality did not please the kolkhoz farmers and nearly every party member asked the raikom to remove him, which they did. He was removed, and they say that he later turned out to be a Trotskyite. Next after him the MTS recommended the deputy director of the MTS, but he also turned out to be a self-supplier and embezzler, and when he resigned, the court fined him 750 rubles. After him the general meeting again elected the former chairman Kuznetsov, who also turned out to be dishonest and the party organization lambasted him, as a result of which the People's Court sentenced him at the end of 1937 to two years, and he served out his punishment in the first half of 1938 and is already living at home. After Kuznetsov Comrade K. V. Nikul'shin, a candidate member, and since April 1938 a full member of the party, has been on the job for all of 1938. He is a man who is devoted to Soviet rule and is trying to do well for the kolkhoz, but for some reasons his work is going very badly, and as I indicated above, [the kolkhoz] is running shamefully behind all of the kolkhozes in every campaign in the raion. Comrade Nikul'shin himself is from the neighboring village of Livenka, from which our kolkhoz has up to thirty families and even has relatives of his, for whom he makes allowances, of course, which causes bitterness among the other kolkhoz farmers. Discipline has grown lax. In spite of the fact that there has been good weather for the whole summer, the harvest has been protracted, the fall plowing for spring planting is still not finished, the fodder for the threshing barns has not been collected from the fields, the threshing barns are empty, and the chaff in the field is getting soaked by the rain half a kilometer away. There is enough winter fodder for the livestock to last only half the winter, and the leaves in the forest have not been collected and the forest is a kilometer away. The winter livestock buildings have still not been prepared and some have not even been puttied. All of the agricultural equipment is scattered about and the kids are ruining it, and all the mowers and winnowing machines with sifters are sitting out in the rain. There is a nice bathhouse, but it has not been heated for more than half a year, and the kolkhoz farmers have forgotten when they last bathed there, and instead they go to Uncle Afonia and ask him to let them into his bathhouse. [Nikul'shin] does not take advice from kolkhoz farmers and does everything on his own authority, without asking either the board members or a general meeting of kolkhoz farmers. For example, he began in the spring, of his own accord, to move the brickyard to another ravine, which has clay and sand, but everybody knows that clay is not good for bricks. Now there were two sheds under way: the carpenters worked for a whole month, and they did not make it before the winter so they began to pull them down. One shed is almost down on the old site, and they are starting to pull down the second one. The furnace is half-collapsed. In 1938 the factory did not operate and bricks were brought in from other villages. According to the estimate of revenue and expenses, they overspent by 17,000, for which the procurator announced in the local raion newspaper as far back as June that he would put the chairman and accountant on trial, but there has still been no word about it, and at the insistence of raion functionaries S. P. Bobrovsky and S. I. Bobrovsky a reprimand for all the crimes was delivered during the third-quarter report [Omitted is an account of the depletion of livestock and other violations by Nikul'shin of kolkhoz regulations.].

As the kolkhoz chairman and a board member of the Livenka village cooperative store, [Nikul'shin] set up another man from Livenka in a stall to sell his wares--S. A. Krynin, who was a livestock breeder in 1932 and squandered 51 pigs, for which he was convicted [sic] for five years, but he served out his punishment in two years, was expelled from the kolkhoz and has still not been re-admitted, but is living on the kolkhoz and is selling is wares at the stall not on the board's say-so but on the kolkhoz chairman's say-so, as a result of which all of S. A. Krynin's children have clothing and shoes, while a widow from Briansk, whose husband Comrade F. A. Zaitsev was a party member and died back when the commune was being established, simply cannot manage to get even one outfit for her three school children, and they, incidentally, were available.

There have been plenty of other abominations, but even they would not be enough to prompt an investigation and put a stop to them. Incidentally, the kolkhoz farmers are writing about all these abominations to the raion newspaper Krepi Kolkhoz and to the Voronezh Oblast newspaper Kommuna, but so far there have been absolutely no results, so I decided to write to the central Krest'ianskaia Gazeta. I hope it will put an stop to these abominations, which are bringing down our kolkhoz.

I am a peasant from the settlement of Losevo, I lived in the center of the settlement. My father was a poor man, he had a seasonal job driving logging rafts from Kalach down the Don River to Rostov. I was born in 1886. Before 1897 I graduated from the rural school and in 1898, egged on by my father, I went to work as an apprentice to the merchant Mikhail Yegorovich Mikushin in the town of Pavlovsk on the Don, served for more than two years with him for nothing, as was the arrangement at the time or was the system for compensating apprentices, that in exchange for learning how to sell wares, boys came and worked for nothing. After I worked for the merchant for more than two years, my father took me home from the merchant in the winter of 1900, you are all I have, he says, and you are having a hard time here, all covered with tar, kerosene and coal: the shop was filthy. When I moved to Losevo, and we got into agriculture, in the summer a fire broke out by accident at the mill in the beginning of August already, and the fire burned down 450 farmsteads--almost the whole center of the settlement, and our whole property also burned down to the foundation, since we lived pretty close to where the fire started. Besides our real property, all of the personal property we had in livestock burned up, as well as all our belongings in the hut. My father and I were eight km away at the time. Left with one mare that had one eye, which we immediately sold for seventeen rubles, as I recall it today, we moved to live with my grandfather on my mother's side. He was a solid middle peasant, and I made an arrangement with a local merchant again and started working for him right up until the Russo-German war, from whom I was taken for the war in 1916. After the fire and until the war my father and I earned enough to buy a horse and a cow, and we also built a hut: the front room was made of wood, and the second was all made of pickets. During my service [with the merchant] I had no ambition to work in agriculture anymore, and I began to study commerce. I subscribed to magazines on merchandising and, in addition, subscribed to bookkeeping courses, which I completed already before the war, but I wasn't able to get an accounting job, since I was taken for the war. My father, though, kept pushing me into agriculture, and when the Stolypin law on securing individual land allotments came out, my father secured three allotments: his, my mother's and mine [Reference is to the land reform of 9 November 1906, which was designed by Prime Minister P.A. Stolypin to facilitate the establishment of individual peasant holdings in place of communal tenure.]. I started arguing with my father that I didn't need it, but the law gave fathers the right to not even get their children's consent to secure. So even now some kolkhoz farmers, whom I insult in the newspaper or at a general meeting over infractions, call me a Stolypinite because of my father's action, and they threaten me, we'll teach you. Some even claim out of spite that I went into hiding from the Losevo settlement so that they would not touch me there, but the situation is completely different and does not pertain to what my enemies accuse me of.

During the war I went through a training detachment and was promoted to junior noncommissioned officer and tried to gain favor with the old-time commanders, but when the February Revolution came I was in a reinforcement company with the 189th infantry regiment, which was posted in the city of Mtsensk in Orel Gubernia and I met a factory worker from Moscow by the name of Sergeev, who explained the importance of the February Revolution to me [Note the parallel with the encounter of P. P. Sergeev (unrelated) with a draft dodger (p. xxx)]. I attached myself to him, and the company elected us the first deputies to the soldiers' assembly, and when our company was sent to the front, I was elected as well by the front company committee to the cultural and educational commission of the 2nd Finland rifle regiment and as librarian of a machinegun detachment, where I began to read contemporary revolutionary literature. I delivered a speech at a revolutionary rally during the Kerenshchina [a derogatory term for the period of the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky--Trans.], for which they wanted to arrest me, but I went into hiding, since the rally of the two regiments took place in the forest. A witness to this--my comrade in Losevo--is still alive. I spoke against the offensive, against the continuation of the war. Before the October Revolution our regiment headed for Petrograd to defend the Provisional bourgeois government, but on the way it broke up over Bolshevism and stopped at Shklov station, where it stayed until the demobilization after the October Revolution. Upon being demobilized I came to Losevo settlement, where I actively began to participate in revolutionary affairs, after which I was elected to the first Losevo Village Soviet. In the village soviet I was elected to the commission for confiscation of bourgeois property, where the first thing I did was to confiscate the property of my [former] master. While the front was shifting I hid from the Cossacks, and when they took off and the Red Army men came to our area, I went back into soviet [work]. My little brother first joined the Red Guard, then the Red Army, where he served for seven years and he was accused because of [our] father too, they didn't believe he was a partisan. In 1919 I was at the Pavlovsk Uezd Congress of Soviets, after which I stayed to serve in the town of Pavlovsk and held various positions all the way up to head of the Ukusprom under the Uezd National Economy [Bureau of Cottage Industry under the uezd council of the national economy.]. I served in Pavlovsk for three years. Before serving in Pavlovsk I put together a family of sixteen people and life was very hard for me in Pavlovsk, where I had only four children, the rest were in Losevo. I was starving terribly and had to leave my job in Pavlovsk and moved to Losevo. At the time I had neither a horse nor a cow. During my service in Pavlovsk we, four comrades from Losevo, established a kolkhoz of fifteen households and during a raid by the Kolesnikov band on Losevo one of our kolkhoz farmers was murdered by the band in the center of Losevo in the square, while we, the founders, were still working in Pavlovsk. When we all arrived in Losevo after the band left, we were unable to save our kolkhoz, the whole thing fell apart--all the kolkhoz farmers handed in their notices of withdrawal from it. That was in 1922. But the uezd organizations would not let us leave Pavlovsk at the time. The uezd party organization was inviting all office employees to join the party, but my comrade with whom I shared an apartment so destroyed my desire that I tore up the application, and it later turned out that this comrade was dekulakized and deported to Karaganda. Of course, I subsequently realized the party's role in the socialist revolution and re-applied, but the application was not examined with me there and one comrade, as I was told afterward, criticized me for my Stolypinite father. With that, the matter just dried up. When I moved to Losevo, I was immediately elected a board member of the Losevo Credit Association, where it was reorganized along Soviet lines. I organized commerce on behalf of the credit association as a specialist in this area, where I engaged in commerce for a year, and then I was a member of the auditing commission of the credit association for two years, and then I was elected a member of the auditing commission of the Losevo Raion Consumers' Union, where I worked for two years. During collectivization I joined the Red Village Kolkhoz in 1929, worked for the three fall months as an accountant, and then in January 1930 during full-scale collectivization the kolkhoz was renamed Red Losevo and I was elected a board member of the kolkhoz and deputy chairman. During the exodus [Reference is to the exodus from kolkhozes in the spring of 1930.] the board was re-elected, and I was again elected deputy chairman and manager of plot No. 1 of the kolkhoz in the center of Losevo settlement--more than five hundred farmsteads. After a year's work on the kolkhoz, where I was one of the first to socialize agricultural equipment and draft animals, I was re-elected again as a member of the kolkhoz auditing commission. The party organization gave me the principal accounting work for the Losevo farmers' cooperative store.

I had two sons--both tractor drivers. One of them worked almost a year on a tractor, and the other, a Red Army man, took tractor courses, and then the chairman of the Dzerzhinsky commune started trying to lure them to the commune, after which they agreed to go with the consent of the raikom, since Losevo had extra tractor drivers and the commune did not have enough. After they worked there in 1931, they were invited to become members of the commune and in August 1931 they were enrolled. Then the chairman began to invite me as well into the commune. When I agreed, the commune board demanded that I be removed from my job at the Losevo cooperative store and that I come work for them, which I did on 10 January 1932. First I worked as a field-crop specialist (polevod) for two years, then as manager of the commercial dairy farm, then as secretary of the board for two years, and after that the MTS appointed me manager of the laboratory hut, which I also established, and in 1938 the oblast land department added a biology lab to the laboratory-hut. Throughout my time on the Dzerzhinsky Kolkhoz I was very active in studies for kolkhoz farmers, for two years I led an agricultural study group, a member of a drama group, a member of a choir, and then I was a member of all the voluntary societies: the MOPR, Radio Amateurs, Down With Illiteracy and Osoviakhim. I have made all voluntary and compulsory payments to the state ahead of the others since 1920. Recently the newspaper Krepi Kolkhoz has announced more than once that I have made my payments ahead of schedule. At present I am in a deputies' group of the Livenka Village Soviet in the commerce and procurement section. I am also a rural correspondent for my kolkhoz wall newspaper, for the raion newspaper Krepi Kolkhoz and the oblast's Kommuna in Voronezh. I have endured a great deal of financial losses in my family due to my work as a rural correspondent. In early 1938 I was elected a member of the editorial board of the kolkhoz wall newspaper. I organized work on the wall newspaper so well that the newspaper Krepi Kolkhoz cited it a week ago as one of the best wall newspapers in the raion. I complained to Krepi Kolkhoz about harassment against me in my work as rural correspondent. Nothing comes of it, since the party organizer or the chairman is summoned to the raion, and they deny everything, so I am to blame again. Next I turned to the oblast procurator, but so far I see no results. With regard to the kolkhoz farmers for whom the kolkhoz was supposed to build houses, as I indicated above, they were built illegally, which I wrote about to the newspapers, but the situation has not been corrected and has created quite a lot of bitterness. My stories, which I wrote for Krepi Kolkhoz, I write them openly and I properly sign my name. I feel that the truth must be written everywhere and all over and I am carrying out the words of Comrade Stalin that the press is the most powerful weapon, which uproots all malingerers, self-suppliers, blabbermouths, usurpers and wreckers. That is why I do everything this way. But those people who stand against the truth, they have become so surrounded by untruth that even a twelve-inch cannon will not get through to them, since they have such an army of toadies that when you start to speak the truth they interpret it as the opposite and even brand you a counterrevolutionary.

A week ago I was elected a member of the auditing commission, they wanted to elect me chairman, but I said I was working as manager of the biolab hut and it was very difficult for me, then they replaced me with someone else, a tractor driver, and the general meeting issued an order to audit all sections of the kolkhoz, since there has not been a proper audit on the kolkhoz from the beginning of the commune to this day, and that is why, I feel, the kolkhoz is falling apart. I will carry out this task, of course, but I need help from above. If I don't get any, it will come out the way it came out in 1932, when the auditing commission began to do a thorough audit and to affect certain people, it came under the purview of the NKVD and was locked up for two months, while the enemies celebrated.

10 November 1938