To the TsK of the VKP(b)

While traveling for my job around a number of oblasts and raions during this summer and fall, but especially lately, I had occasion to observe some awful scenes at train stations in large and small towns.

Thousands of families had taken shelter and in some places women, children and sick old people are still taking shelter near railroad stations and inside the stations.

These are all people who were exiled from various cities because they had family members who were once on trial or convicted and are serving sentences.

The Novgorod NKVD is apparently displaying particular zeal in banishing people. No matter where I stayed, I encountered dozens of Novgorod families everywhere. According to the exiles themselves, about a thousand families were banished between the middle of October and 1 November, and people are moving who knows where, they have no housing, no jobs and no means of subsistence, people are wandering around with no shelter, and there are many thousands of them. In Kotel’nich, Viatka, Glazov, Bui and other small towns--everywhere they are packed, apart from those who are banished to specific places.

It is proper to banishing people from border areas when they are politically dangerous and have been tried for counterrevolutionary acts, but to banish absolutely everyone who has been tried, their families, sick elderly and old people, is the handiwork of some wrecker.

I observed about fifty people of various ages in Kotel’nich. They were wandering around the railroad station with children. A group of foreigners was passing through and went up to them, asked them some questions and shook their heads. People and all the exiles have arrived--they have no apartments and no jobs, and it is fall. If any of them are fortunate enough to find shelter in cold sheds or village bathhouses, they are very lucky.

When I passed through these towns in November, I was curious and found out that people had traveled on and were probably wasting away in other places, if half of them haven’t died.

I daresay that the TsK of the Party doesn’t know about this, and therefore I decided to write you because this is something unhealthy and apparently the functionaries of some NKVD bureaus have completely let themselves go, even engaging in high-handed behavior, especially in Leningrad Oblast.

They give you twenty four hours to leave and people in a panic sell their property for a song and start traveling anywhere, just to get out.

They don’t even spare sick people.

The TsK should give some definite instructions to the NKVD so that there is no high-handed behavior in the provinces, otherwise things turn out badly. V. Antipov.

Borovaia Street, 2, Apt. 7, Leningrad

Cherepovets Railroad Station

12 December 1938