Document 88

Letter of appeal from K. Pol' to Stalin, 21 January 1939

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 121, d. 19, ll. 41-43. Typewritten original.

Dear Comrade Stalin!

Permit me, on the basis of your directive about the importance of the experiences of ordinary people, to describe to you what some rank-and-file party members and Komsomol members must go through with regard to certain complex issues of our time [Omitted is a lengthy discussion of the notion that relatives of enemies of the people and of people living abroad should not be persecuted, based on a variation of Stalin's words "The son is not responsible for the father."

As an illustration, I will describe what my son, a Komsomol member nineteen years old, and I have had to and are [going through]. I have been a member of the VKP since 1919. I was in party work until 1926, and in 1930, upon graduating from the party-history department of the Institute of Red Professors, I went into research and journalistic work. In 1936, when I learned from a letter from the Moscow Committee about the arrest of Sokol'nikov, I reported to the Party committee of the RSFSR People's Commissariat of Education, where I was working at the time, that Sokol'nikov was a first cousin of mine but that I had had nothing to do with him and had not seen him since 1924. Because of this I was expelled from the party and fired from my job. I had no party card for a year, and I was without work for eight months. Only after the January plenum did the Party Control Commission under the TsK of the VKP(b) reinstate me in the party, and it did not impose any penalty on me. But despite my request for a removal of the stern reprimand that had been imposed on me in 1936 by the enemies of the people who were sitting in the party committee of the Vuamlin [VUAMLIN stands for the Higher Administration of Associations of Marxist-Leninist Institutes [Vysshee upravlenie assotsiatsii marksistsko-leninskikh institutov] (Dzenis, Gittel' et al.) Afor letting down Bolshevik vigilance,@ the Party Control Commission did not remove this stigma, even though the entire gang that imposed it has long since been exposed. Before this I was unable to obtain a removal of this penalty for a year in the party committee of the People's Commissariat of Education, because the party committee was in the hands of enemies of the people (Romanov, M. Orakhelashvili et al.). Now I have been teaching the history of the USSR and the Constitution in School No. 332 in Krasnogvardeisky Raion for a year. I have been an excellent teacher the whole time and I have done active party work. I have been in the party organization of the raion department of public education for eight months. My request to have the penalty stricken has been raised four times in the party committee and each time it has been denied on the grounds that they don't know me well enough. I have visited Comrade Stepanenko, the secretary of the raion committee, three times on this issue. He promised to help me and use me in party work, but nothing has been done. Before the Institute of Red Professors I graduated from the history and philology department of Petrograd University, and I have a good command of German and French and can read English. I have experience in research work, teaching the history of the VKP and Leninism in higher educational institutions, journalism and propaganda work, and mass-agitation work at enterprises. Nearly a year has passed already since my reinstatement in the party, but all of my attempts to get a production job or party work in my profession have been in vain. It's the same story everywhere: they need people very badly, they are downright joyful to greet you, but when you tell them about your relative and penalty, they turn you down, either openly or on some other pretext. Here are examples. I submitted a proposal to the international-law section of the Institute of Law of the Academy of Sciences to write a doctoral dissertation under their direction on the foreign policy of the USSR and to compile an anthology called, "Lenin and Stalin on the Struggle of the USSR For Peace." I have been working on these issues for a number of years and I fervently want to write a book suitable for the broad masses on the history of our struggle for peace. First I was told there was a vital need for such a book, but then they turned down the idea. True, I am working as a member of the section and I actively participate in the discussion of other comrades' works, but I don't get any research assignments.

During the summer I brought articles on international issues to [the newspaper] Rabochaia Moskva. I asked, where is the head of the foreign department? They said, he isn't here. "What about his deputy?" "He's not here either." "Then some staff member of the department?" "No one's there."

Then I went to the editor of the newspaper. After questioning me about my qualifications, he immediately started talking about managing the international department, but once he heard about my relative he wrote down my telephone number and Y never called. I went to the journal Propagandist. I was commissioned to write an article about the Rostov strike [Reference is to a general political strike from 4 to 26 November 1902 in Rostov-on-Don, organized by the local committee of the RSDRP]. When they read it, they ordered a second from me about the Obukhov defense [Reference is to a clash lasting several hours between workers of the Obukhov plant in St. Petersburg and police on 7 May 1901. Considered to be one of the first politically motivated mass actions in Russia.]. They accepted both articles and offered me a job on the staff. But when I told them about my relative and especially the reprimand, they did not print either article, even though they had found them to be good. In the eight months that I have been in the Krasnogvardeisky Raion party organization, the raikom has not given me a single assignment and has not had me conduct a single discussion or report. I have not been at the plants for three years, whereas I used to hold two or three discussions a week at enterprises. Is all this proper, Comrade Stalin?

Now a few words about my son. He has been a member of the VLKSM since 1936. He is a third-year student at the Moscow Institute of Geological Exploration. Although he has never seen Sokol'nikov in his life and reported this connection of his own accord, he was expelled twice from the VLKSM because of this and because of my expulsion, and was reinstated without any penalty after the January plenum . . . .