Document 61

Letter from K. F. Shestakova to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta proposing revisions to Constitution, 1936

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 232, ll. 80-82. Typewritten copy.

I, the undersigned kolkhoz farmer, have decided to write you a letter and tell you about my life. I have a very hard life. Every spring there is not enough bread. I have two sons, the first sixteen years old, the second five. It is very hard for me to raise them. I have no husband--he died. I hear from the newspapers (my son reads them) that kolkhoz farmers write that they are well off and pass their own law. In the old days the poor people kept quiet at meetings, and the folks who were well off managed everything. Now we poor people are electing poor people to the administration, but we don't get much joy out of it. For instance, I am a poor widow, and every winter I starve. My son was in the fifth grade in the raion six kilometers away, and in the fall he was happy to go, as long as it was warm and there was bread, but midway through the winter the bread ran out and the cold weather was brutal, and my son stopped going to school because he wasn't eating enough, he began to slow down as far as understanding his studies, he had no boots, and he had no warm overcoat either. These were the main reasons he didn't finish his studies.

Who is going to help me, a poor widow? The kolkhoz board gave sixteen kg for my two sons for a month, and I ate with them. They write that our law is not only not for the poor, it is for the well-off. We poor people say that we're not able to pay for milk and meat and wool, the poor should be relieved of this. But our words are not taken into consideration, whatever the well-off people say, that is what is resolved. At the general meeting of kolkhoz farmers things are not done our way either. I have lost all my strength from not having enough to eat, and it's hard to work at the same level as the others.

I often remember Lenin, how kind he was for us, for the peasants, he took the land away from the landowners, gave it to the peasants and ordered them to divide it among everybody. In those days everybody was well fed, nobody went hungry. Lenin died too early. Now things are worse for us, poor widows, than they were before the Revolution. At that time the capitalists were in charge and didn't ask anything of us: no wool, no meat, no milk. Now the Communists are in charge and ask for absolutely everything. There is no bread. They order us to turn in the milk, and even to deliver meat. We have to buy the meat and turn it in. Why do the Communists treat us so badly, in a way that the capitalists didn't--they didn't starve poor peasants?

You write that we should write our suggestions to Krest'ianskaia Gazeta. So I deem it necessary to insert in the draft--exempt low-capacity poor farms from milk and meat deliveries, exempt farms ruined by White bandits. Why has it come about in the U.S.S.R. that there are two classes--one liberated and the other oppressed? The state buys everything at low prices from us and sells to us at high prices. It buys grain for six rubles a centner and sells bread to us ninety five rubles a centner.

The new draft refers to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. And we poor people are asking the editors to write our letters in the newspaper. We have a hard life, we want to live better, so that we can also see a well-to-do life in our families.

We need the freedom to sell only our surpluses, and not this way--leaving our children hungry and turning in and selling the milk to the state. We are all working people, like the workers and office clerks and kolkhoz farmers--a kolkhoz farmer is a human being too, he also needs to eat well. Don't leave the poor kolkhoz farmers to go hungry. Only the ones with children and families are poor. Lenin felt sorry for the peasants with many children and ordered that the land be divided among everybody. The peasants without children said it should be divided among workers. Right now the peasants without children have a very easy and good life, they are the only ones giving praise, but there are hundreds of thousands of poor people, hungry and unclothed.

Please put into the draft: any farm that suffered at the hands of a White gang in 1919 for the cause of socialism is to be exempted from deliveries to the state of milk and meat and wool. Exempt poor farms with three or four small children, they need to eat well, but we don't have enough milk and our children often get sick.

A widowed kolkhoz farmer, half-starved, I write and wash myself in tears.