Document 91

Copy of letter in report on resettlement from Chuvash ASSR to Altai Krai, 1940

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 123, d. 42, ll. 59-59ob., 61. Certified, handwritten copy.

It will soon be a year since we moved from Chuvashia but if you take how we live at the present time. [sic] We have no livestock at all, because the board doesn't help us [Omitted is a section on the use of benefits for new settlers to write off the kolkhoz's debts and arrears.]. Basically are we to blame for their arrears last year or something? We live in shabby apartments, the frigid winter has hit us hard, the shacks are in disrepair and haven't been fixed, the windows too, but the kolkhoz has received glass for us but hasn't fixed it for us, instead they used the glass meant for us for livestock breeding and after that we had to board up the windows and seal them with clay . . . .

We have no bathhouse and we don't have a horse to go for firewood and they don't even give us one, we wash ourselves in the bathhouse once every four or five weeks, and there are even unpleasant things that occur. Our clothing is all worn out, but we can't get any at the store, they always throw us off the line because they say you haven't paid your share dues, even the raion functionaries don't think about us, but lately we are ashamed to go outside, everything we wore is tattered, but there is nowhere to buy anything, yet when they recruited us to come here they said clothing would be sold to us above all, but when we arrived there was nothing to be had.

Basically we are not considered needed people here, we are considered the same as swine, for example: when new settler Pyotr Sergeev was standing by the warehouse to receive five kg of flour, the attendant refused to give him any, instead he kicked him in the chest and knocked him down and said Chuvash they are just like swine so live on potatoes, but flour is needed for Russians, well then where is Stalin's Constitution on equal rights . . . .

While [we] were sitting at a table with new settler V. A. Alekseev and S. Kh. Aleksandrov we were approached by A. L. Zhirov and he yelled at us get up from the table, we will eat first, and the leftovers will be for the new settlers, he said, all you new settlers are eating other people's bread . . . .

Stalin Kolkhoz, Chervovsky Village Soviet, Kosikha Raion, Ovchinnikovo station, Altai Krai.

1. Yekaterina Kupriianovna Kozlova moved from the Dmitrov Kolkhoz in Ibresi Raion to the Anatoly Kolkhoz under the Talitsa Village Soviet, Zalesovo Raion, in Altai Krai. I fenced in a garden together with Il'in Zakharovich Shirtanovsky, and with Yegor Nikitin from the village of Nizhniaia Vysla. But some peasants and younger fellows who have lived there for a long time got together, a drunken mob, and tore up the fence around the garden with these wooden poles, smashed windows and used the poles to wreck the ovens of Pavel Trofimov and Fedot Denisov.

These men from the area said you should be kicked out, what the hell did you come here for, you think money grows on trees here or something. We complained to the raion and they didn't take any measures there and we were forced to come back here. . . .

2. Yemel'ian Gavrilovich Gavrilov (old man).

I came to resettle, moved into a house there were windows, there was a little oven, as soon as I moved in they smashed all the windows in one day, they wrecked the oven and turned the house into a toilet. . . .

We had cases like this we temporarily had no bread for seventeen days (the old man wept as he spoke). There were cases when new settlers ate carrion. For example Fedot Denisov ate a dead heifer, and so did Nikolai Nikitin.