Document 92

Report on exiled Poles in Kustanai Oblast, Kazakh SSR, 21 August 1940

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 123, d. 42, ll. 7-8. Certified, typewritten copy.

On the Demoralizing Influence on Kolkhoz Labor Discipline of Kulaks and Bourgeoisie Exiled From the Former Poland to Kustanai Oblast in the Kazakh SSR

. . . . Exiled kulaks are put up in the homes of kolkhoz farmers, often without the latter's consent. There have been cases in which one kolkhozY arranged such a cordial welcome for exiles that it gave them a day's milk yield from the dairy section, so that the kolkhoz farmers' children at the open-air kindergarten were left without milk. There have been cases in which certain kolkhoz chairmen have taken exiles into their apartments. Combine and tractor operators and other kolkhoz activists have married exiles.

Exiles are credited with labordays and paid on an equal footing with kolkhoz farmers for their work on the kolkhoz.

In the vast majority of cases these bourgeois and kulaks don't do anything on the kolkhoz. Many of them arrived with enough money, clothing and other belongings, and some of them receive money transfers of two thousand to three thousand rubles each, evidently from relatives.

They buy foodstuffs from kolkhoz farmers, but they don't want to work and nobody makes them.

Twenty families of exiles [at the Dzhanaul in Karabalyk Raion] did not do anything, explaining that they were not used Ain their vocation" . . . .

At the Magnai MTS in the same raion, a former officer arrived with his orderly, and the latter continued even here to make coffee for him and to polish and remove his boots, and when the NKVD transferred his former orderly to another kolkhoz, the officer did not take off his boots for a week, and when his feet became swollen, he took the boots off and has not put them on for two weeks. . . .

There are many exiles in Fyodorovka Raion, in the raion center itself, who have also been placed in kolkhoz farmers' homes, who don't do anything, spend entire days sitting in a restaurant and strolling around the market and around offices . . . .

There are cases in the oblast center itself, the city of Kustanai, when exiles are hired as office typists and clerks and are even hired to work in such organizations as Zagotzerno [the All-Union Bureau for Grain Procurement and Sales], where possible acts of sabotage by them are not out of the question. . . .