Day 30 month 10 year 1938

Comrade Uritsky, I sincerely thank you and our valiant Comrade Stalin for your such hard efforts for us peasants. How our valiant Comrade Stalin shows concern for every person tirelessly day and night so that every peasant can only take care of himself and so that no peasant can give himself up to another saboteur turns over all his resolutions to you Comrade Uritsky as his faithful friend so that you can distribute to the whole population through Krest’ianskaia Gazeta and you teach so that we can all be literate. For this I sincerely thank you a hundred times I am already an old man, sixty eight years old and through your Krest’ianskaia Gazeta I have learned to read and write a little it’s just too bad that I’ve lost my eyesight.

So I subscribe to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta not just because I want to read it but I ask you Comrade Uritsky whatever little articles I send you that are worthy that you print them in Krest’ianskaia Gazeta [Omitted is a discussion of the rise of the Romanovs.].

Now let’s talk about the sovereigns. When he took over the sovereign Peter I he was already sovereign not with the boyars but with the ministers and the generals and Peter wanted to develop Russia so when he rode around the German kingdoms he liked the cultured German manners and he took teachers from the German states to educate Russia and from England, Germany, from France and Italy, and gave them the power to run all of Russia.

Then after reigning until he was twenty nine he remembered what kind of sovereign am I when teachers are ruling all of Russia but I am the tsar and he thought about how to take power into his own hands. He gives the order to divide the troops into four parts and do maneuvers but with empty weapons and we will fight and whoever takes the most prisoners will have the power. So they went out to the maneuvers he thought they would all fight for themselves but they only fought for Peter and when they pressed him up against the Neva so he would surrender he didn’t surrender but set strict discipline for his soldiers, didn’t allow himself to get caught then jumped into the Neva [with] his detachment and in the Neva there were rafts floating so he floated down the Neva on the rafts for a whole week and came ashore across the border where maneuvers were set. Then he waited for nightfall with his detachment [words unintelligible] he checked all around him and poured a flask of alcohol for his soldiers and orders his soldiers go to the battle line and get the whole line drunk but make sure you don’t drink anything yourself. The soldiers did just that and when the whole battle line was drunk and passed out then Peter and his detachments surrounded the whole [word unintelligible] and cried out surrender you are all my prisoners and power is mine.

After these maneuvers he took ill and three years later he died and his wife Catherine was very thin and bony. Two men with outstretched arms could not reach around her. She not only gave up power to the leading bodies but also gave up her peasants to serfdom. The peasants lived in serfdom under the sovereigns first Catherine’s son Paul, Paul’s son Alexander and Alexander’s son Nicholas. When war broke out with the French in Sevastopol’ Nicholas died. Alexander his son took power and got rid of serfdom and wanted to take land away and give it to the peasants but the leading bodies killed him.

Now Alexander III ruled supposedly he was a peacemaker. Then Nicholas [II] took over who gathered the State Duma so many times [three words unintelligible]. The State Duma didn’t take place and so he received the command that you don’t give power and you don’t remove us from it when he left the throne himself he smashed everything now the entire old government has been hanged and shot. And our valiant Comrade Vladimir Il’ich Lenin smashed all of the old gang took power put party people in the posts and as much as he struggled for the people when he ended his life he couldn’t beat his enemies.

Now Comrade Lenin left a faithful and true friend to fight for us against saboteurs and said we must have millions and millions of Communists then we can have the idea of the people’s life.

So our valiant Comrade Stalin already tightened all the faucets so tightly both on the border and inside the country with his faithful Stakhanovites and it seems as though there shouldn’t be any breakdowns anywhere. But there are.

Here is an example. Again in Siberian Oblast, Kuibyshev Raion, Yepashin Village Soviet, at the Bliukher Kolkhoz in the village of Konstantinovka, grain was threshed during the 1937 harvest you might say in the months of April and May, and this grain threshing was not given for labordays or for anything, they just left it for too long to rot on the ladoshki [Open, tamped-down, clayey areas where grain was poured during the harvest.] more than 200 centners of rye about twenty five or fifty centners of wheat--and the rest were oats that just lay there probably then they will send people to inspect and I, Karniush, am accountable [to the point] of capital punishment. . . .

Signed Ivan Kirillovich Karniush