Document 42

Party verification of railroad employees, 1932

RGASPI, f. 117, op. 114, d. 346, ll. 143-144. Typed original.

Renewed Activity by the Class Enemy and the Fight Against It

We possess a substantial number of facts pointing to renewed activity by class- alien, counter-revolutionary, kulak, SR, and Trotskyite factions that is manifested in deteriorating work discipline, declining work quality, and various incidents of sabotage and wholesale theft (on the Moscow-Kazan RR, SR factions in Ruzaevka, Alatyr', Penza, and Yudin; on the Moscow-Kursk RR, in Plekhanovo and Tula SR and Trotskyite terrorist groups with two "Communist" collaborators; on the North-Caucasus RR, at Krasnodar Station a counter-revolutionary organization of men from former "haves:" a priest, a tsarist military officer, a kulak, and a military bureaucrat, and others; on the Western RR, at Maloiaroslavets a counterrevolutionary bandit organization headed by bureaucrats from tsarist times with connections abroad, and a "shock-worker" and his band of twenty five).

Proof of sabotage: at the Maloiaroslavets Repair Shops repeated arson in the cabs of competing locomotives. In the October RR's Moscow Shops competing engineers have been systematically harassed, sand poured into the axle-boxes of their locomotives, and tools looted. Timetables on the Yekaterinsk RR were designed to sabotage, and the Siberian, Far East, and other lines have sabotage organizations.

In December on the Moscow-Kazan RR. communication lines were damaged fourteen times, rendering the lines useless for a total of more than ten hours.

Recently, party organizers and cell members have significantly intensified their fight against the class enemy. For example, class enemies holding party cards have been exposed and expelled: six "Communists" from the cell at the Golutvino Shops of the Moscow-Kazan RR, a secret tie between the secretary of the party collective at Kurgan Station and kulaks. In Zlatoust the secretary of the Komsomol cell and the head of the technical propaganda office were exposed as kulak agents. The secretary of the party cell of workers also had a secret tie [with class enemies]. Secret enemies were exposed who had shielded themselves with Party membership along the North Caucasian and Trans-Caucasian RRs, at the Krasnodar, Novocherkassk, Tikhoretsk, Baku, Nantlug, Akstafa, and other stations.

Recently, on many railroads (Perm, Moscow-Kazan, Omsk, Tomsk, Northern Moscow Belt Line) bands of thieves have been exposed by GPU and party organizations. More than fifty percent of these thieves are themselves railroad workers. In some instances bands are run by Communists (for example, one Petrov who worked for three years as cell secretary of the Moscow freight station on the October RR turned out to be the leader of a band of thieves).

However, to put it bluntly, the fight against the class enemy is still far from being sufficiently intense in day-to-day work. The vast majority of Communists are not exercising party vigilance at the high level needed, and in some instances in cells as well as among party organizers class vigilance and party alertness has obviously been blunted (in the party organizations of the Golutvino Shops, the stations at Krasnodar, Moscow, and Penza, the Nizhni Novgorod and Moscow freight stations, Penza Station, the Maloiaroslavets Shops, and at other places.)

In view of the facts cited here, we think the purge of the party on the railroads should have the highest priority, that new, broad, and thorough verifications should be carried out in conjunction with the GPU, and that class-alien and kulak elements should be chased out of the transportation industry.