Document 60

Letter of complaint of F. M. Plindina, Voronezh Oblast, 1936

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 232, l. 83. Typewritten copy.

Maybe some people are shy about writing, but I will write the real truth, the whole opinion of the people: everybody thanks Soviet rule for the fact that the government took all the enterprises away from the landowners, and everybody thanks it for saying that there should be no war. But people on the kolkhoz are not happy that everybody is hungry and are quietly saying, but are obviously afraid to say, that because the whole enterprise belongs to the state, the peasant does all this work and has to give a certain amount from each hectare to the state, so that there will be no war.

Because I see that people don't want to work on kolkhozes, is it really possible that people at the newspaper haven't heard this--peasants want to put in the new Constitution, I hear it from the people, but everybody's afraid of saying at the meetings that we don't want to be on the kolkhoz, we work and work, and there's nothing to eat. Really, how can we live? Everybody says we have almost no bread on the kolkhoz now, and where are we going to scrape together a ruble per kilo.