Document 98

Letter to Pravda on "Mistakes in . . . Viipuri Party Gorkom," 15 January 1941

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 122, d. 8, ll. 16-19. Certified, typewritten copy.

Mistakes in the Activities of the Viipuri (Vyborg) Party Gorkom

It is especially important that every resident of Viipuri is always on alert and display Bolshevik vigilance. Fires or major disasters occur almost daily here at the power plant, the gas plant or on the water pipeline. This is not by chance, of course. There are still a lot of suspicious people, a lot of chiselers and crooks in the city.

Things are not calm at the border. Almost every day border guards detain spies and saboteurs who have been sent in by the White Finns [The standard Soviet term for the Finnish government against which the Soviet Union had been at war during the winter of 1939-40.]. There was a case in which three Finnish airplanes crossed the border and reconnoitered in the area between Sortavala and Viipuri.

Under these conditions the gorkom should orient Communists toward intensifying their vigilance. Unfortunately, this is not happening. An intolerable complacency and lack of concern are being displayed. Recently Comrade Yushchenko a staff member of the local newspaper a nonparty member was talking with Comrade Ivanov an engineer who is a Communist, a responsible functionary of the power plant. Without even finding out who he was talking to, Ivanov blabbed out over the telephone the contents of a secret resolution by the gorkom bureau on the work of the power plant. This kind of excessive, unhealthy trustfulness exists in the gorkom, at enterprises (the Johannes integrated works and the shipyard) and on the river steamship line. They talk about everything: the capacities of plants and factories, defense measures and the fortification of the border.

Or take this fact: there are still dozens and hundreds of Russian-language books published in Helsinki, Riga and Berlin that are left in people's homes. The content of these books is anti-Soviet. But no one is really getting down to removing them. The pupils in school No. 1 are taking up the works of Charskaia. The principal's office at a vocational school has in it what are obviously fascist books (in Finnish), which should have been removed long ago. What is more, for a long time a board with an Aincomprehensible inscription@ hung on the wall of the school's gymnasium (there used to be a lycée here). Actually the inscription read: such-and-such pupils from the lycée died in the struggle against the Bolsheviks . . .

Nonchalance is displayed even when people are appointed to responsible posts. Comrade Parshina a nineteen-year-old girl who had just arrived from Piatigorsk came to see the director of the river steamship line Sukharev. She wanted to have a job. Without checking her [internal] passport or getting a clear idea of where she had come from to Viipuri and why, the director of the steamship line decides:

"You will go to the Saimaa Canal."

And a nineteen-year-old girl who graduated from the tenth grade [the final grade of secondary school] this year goes . . . to the border to be the director of a canal lock.

During the summer a lot of adventurers and chiselers arrived in the city. Some of them set themselves up in trading organizations and began to sell trophy property. To this day there are embezzlers and thieves working at the trust for cafés and cafeterias. . . .