Document 47

Party review of higher educational institutions in Azov-Black Sea Krai, 1935

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 695, ll. 31-40. Typed original.

During December 1934 and January of this year in higher educational institutions and technical colleges there were a number of anti-party and counterrevolutionary sallies and speeches, most of which were not repulsed properly or in a timely fashion by party and Komsomol organizations. The faculties of higher educational institutions are severely infested with Trotskyites and the student body with class-alien and hostile elements who have easily infiltrated these institutions thanks to poorly organized admittance procedures.

Sixty thousand students are concentrated in the higher educational institutions of the Azov-Black Sea Krai. There are cities such as Novocherkassk where approximately sixty percent of the party organization is comprised of students. Despite this, until the end of December, the Krai Committee and City and Raion Committees concerned themselves very little with these institutions and then only with matters related to their everyday needs. The appointment and verification of faculty (especially in the social sciences and humanities), recruitment of personnel, the work of the institutions' party and Komsomol organizations, and mass political work were areas completely neglected.

More than a few alien and hostile elements had wormed their way into a number of these institutions' Komsomol organizations (and the portion of Komsomol members in most of the institutions is significant: thirty to forty percent). This explains why there have been quite a few instances of counterrevolutionary statements and speeches by Komsomol members. . . .

On 30 December 1934, during the examination period, V. Khriukin, a member of the Komsomol and a third-year student in the History Department at the Rostov Pedagogical Institute, openly defended Zinoviev and Kamenev. He declared that Zinoviev and Kamenev rendered enormous services to the Revolution, were friends of Lenin, and that now all this was being obliterated. Khriukin further declared that Zinoviev had no tie with the terrorists who killed Comrade Kirov, that in general members of the opposition cannot be champions of terror, and that the judicial procedure used to establish an ideological tie between the terrorists and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group was improper.

On 3 January a Komsomol meeting took place to which Khriukin was admitted even though he had already been expelled from the Komsomol and the Institute. The meeting's presidium afforded Khriukin the opportunity to present his counterrevolutionary views despite protests from the Komsomol members present.

After Khriukin's arrest, in the process of the investigation, it was determined that Khriukin was closely connected with the following group of students at the Pedagogical Institute: Elin, Chalov, Ustimenko, Gavrilov, and K. Khriukin. All these individuals (not bona fide party members), the investigation determined, got into the Institute by means of forged documents. In 1932, on Elin's and K. Khriukin's initiative, the individuals named stole from the party committee of the "Comintern" Mine (Shakhty Raion) a large quantity of blank associate party member and registration cards, filled them out in their own names and, having prepared false documents about graduating from nine-year schools, gained admission to the Institute.

In the Rostov Financial and Economics Institute on 1 January 1935 at a conference of party and Komsomol organizers and individuals assigned by the party, student Kondeev (a Komsomol member) declared: "One must also pay attention to the contributions of Zinoviev and others. Why do you only consider their faults? Zinoviev is a great leader. He was president of the Comintern." Having said this, he left the meeting. That same day Kondeev assembled groups of students and passionately defended Zinoviev, [Leonid] Nikolaev [assassin of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party secretary, on 1 December 1934] and other counterrevolutionaries.

In the evening at a meeting of a Komsomol group the question of excluding Kondeev from the Komsomol and the Institute was raised. In spite of the fact that Kondeev's counterrevolutionary position was quite clear, he was afforded the opportunity of delivering an unabashedly counterrevolutionary sermon. At the end he said straight out that the purpose of his remarks was "to show the students that the party and government and our party committee in particular had wrongly judged the members of the opposition." After his expulsion from the Komsomol and from the Institute, Kondeev immediately went underground, disappeared [Omitted are accounts of "counterrevolutionary agitation" at several Novocherkassk institutes.].

The Akimov incident illustrates how weak is the political vigilance of party members at the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute. Akimov (not a party member), a recent graduate of the Institute's Aviation Department given an appointment in Plant No. 22, time and again expressed counterrevolutionary views when he was among party members, especially of late:

"Soviet authority can exist without communists. It's much better for engineers to work for capitalists than in our industries. . . . Kirov's murder wasn't connected with Trotskyites; that's all nonsense. Zinoviev is a good man. He truly acted on behalf of the masses."

Akimov was expelled from the Institute in 1934 for rowdiness, but several Communists vouched for him and he was re-admitted and allowed to graduate. These Communists (Serdiukov, Gurenko, and Kabanov) have since been severely reprimanded by the party.

In Krasnodar, at the Kuban Pedagogical Technical College, student Diakov, ex-Komsomol member, systematically carried on counterrevolutionary conversations. This was known to a number of Komsomol members and Communists, but they did little to rebuff Diakov. As Diakov left the hall where a memorial service occasioned by Kirov's murder was in progress, he said to a group of students: "One's been done in, soon they'll all be done in. They'll all be killed off."

Who is Diakov? It turns out he was expelled twice from a kolkhoz, once for acting under false pretenses, the second time for fouling up work records that caused a work brigade to fall apart. Yet this didn't prevent him from being admitted as a student.

A student of the workers' and peasants' preparatory department (rabfak) at the Kuban Pedagogical Institute named Kriukova, who had been a member of the Komsomol since 1931, gave a note during class to the student next to her which read "I salute Nikolaev for the murder of Kirov."

In November, 1934 NKVD organs uncovered in Krasnodar a counterrevolutionary fascist youth group made up chiefly of students from the Kuban Pedagogical Institute, with the pretentious name of "labor-democratic party." This group (twenty people in all) had something in the way of a "program," attempted to establish ties abroad, set up a press, obtained weapons, hatched schemes to kill local party and Soviet officials, and so on. The basic goal of the group's program was restoration of private property and the overthrow of Soviet power.

The principal organizer of this fascist group, Zorbidi (not a party member), had been arrested as early as 1932 for counterrevolutionary work among the youth of Kholmsk stanitsa. At the end of 1932 he was freed (since he was a minor) and immediately got himself admitted to the Kuban Pedagogical Institute where he furthered his counterrevolutionary work on a much broader scale.

By sentence of the military tribunal of SKVO [Severo-Kavkazky Voennyi Okrug (North Caucasus Military District)] in January 1935, Zorbidi and another organizer of the "labor-democratic party" were condemned and shot; the remaining members of this group were sent to concentration camps for various periods of time.

What elements were these counterrevolutionary youths, age nineteen to twenty, recruited from? They were primarily children of class enemies, filled with hate and spite for Soviet power from childhood. In his testimony defendant Kanshin (b. 1916), for example, talks about this very fact:

"My father had a bakery. My family life affected the formation of my ideology, even while I was still in school. More than once when I was still a child I would hear this or that expression of dissatisfaction with the existing Soviet order. These sentiments were passed on to me as well."