Document 18

Letter from V. M. Kovalchuk on flight from collective farms in North Caucasus Krai, 1932

RGAE, f. 7486s, op. 1, d. 236, l. 8. Typed copy.

I write not as one who gives in to difficulties, not as an enemy of Soviet power, but as a man who fought for it.

In Chamlyk Raion there is one kolkhoz, second in size in the krai, that fulfills a three hundred thousand pood state grain procurement, but the trouble is this socialist farm is melting like the spring snow, people are fleeing the kolkhoz for who knows where. At the kolkhoz they took all the grain away and left a little field corn for the people to live on. All this is the result of the kolkhoz's unavoidable disintegration, and what a disgrace that is!

The kolkhoz plants wheat and lives on corn. Everyone's mood is almost anti-Soviet. Dear comrades, now you go and take any one of us, set in front of us only field corn without any grease, dress us in rags, shoes without soles, and force us out to work on the steppe when the temperature is twenty five degrees below zero [Centigrade]; wouldn't any of you become a deviant and curse all and everything?

Here is one example. At the stanitsa we have some thirteen thousand hectares of land, before the Revolution there were twelve thousand people and now there are eight thousand. There has been a decrease in people, the rest don't have the strength to do the harvesting, as a result thousands of hectares of various crops are rotting on the steppe, overgrown with weeds.

The people have become pretty malicious, they look disapprovingly at the Communists, the Communist cell has lost its authority. Members of the Party also. Now we have to meet contract requirements for delivery of hens, this also intensifies anger among the peasants. Out of people fighting for Soviet power they are now making people who are against Soviet power because every last kernel of grain has been taken from them and they have nothing to chew on. Every night seven to ten households abandon the stanitsa. This on account of the good life. I've permitted myself to express my opinion as one comrade to another, to the masses I speak differently, the way Soviet authority talks.