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From the report of the People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR A. V. Lunacharsky to the secretaries of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee A. S. Kiselev and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks L. M. Kaganovich about a trip to Siberia. January 18, 1929
Dated: 1929.01.19

Source: The tragedy of the Soviet village. Collectivization and dispossession. Documents and materials Volume 1 May 1927 - November 1929. Moscow ROSSPEN 1999. Pp. 515-518.

Archive: GARF. F. 1235. Op. 141. D. 116. L. 2—2v., 10v.—13v. Script.

№ 153

Secret.

On the morning of the 17th, I left in the direction of Barnaul in order to make presentations to the peasant population of this region and to take part in the conference of the poor now taking place here.

The first task I completed after Novosibirsk was a detour of Altai. This detour began on December 16th. On the seventeenth we arrived in Barnaul, where I made a presentation at the meeting. There were railroad workers, some Soviet workers of the Barnaul district and a large majority of local peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants, as well as a fair number of farm laborers. Since almost all the collections in Altai had the same character, that is why I will characterize them all together and only then I will note some features of individual reports. We left Barnaul at 12 midnight after a six-hour meeting. In the morning we arrived in Rubtsovka, where a six-hour session also took place at a meeting with a predominantly peasant and farm laborer composition. Immediately I examined the city of Rubtsovka itself, which was of considerable interest, which I write about below, and in the evening we were in time for six o'clock in Shipunovo, where I made a report at a large meeting of almost exclusively peasant laborers, which lasted 6 hours, so that on that day, on the 18th, I was generally busy for 12 hours, of which I talked for seven hours , read the report, the last word and the answer to the note. On the way back we stopped at Aleiskoye, where our meeting took place on the evening of the 19th. Then they returned to Novosibirsk.

My trip to Altai was extremely instructive for me and, as I hope, quite fruitful for the population, at least this is the opinion of the secretary of the regional executive committee Comrade Rezchikov, who accompanied me all the time, as well as the opinion of the comrades of the chairmen of the district and district executive committees Kambalin, Tkachev , Kergetova.

The overall level of meetings exceeded all my expectations. The peasantry represented at the meetings was a truly remarkable spectacle, both in terms of the maturity of their judgments and in their gravitation towards collective-farm construction, which is extremely noticeable in their statements and in the practice that already exists behind these statements. I never thought that socialism had taken such deep roots in the peasantry, and even more so here, in the wheaten Altai, and that we had so fundamentally altered, so to speak, the molecular structure of the countryside.

True, I must now make the reservation that at the reporting meetings connected with the elections, the kulaks are not at all represented. The kulaks in the Altai are, of course, extremely strong. It made every effort to attend the meetings. So, for example, we learned that the Aley kulaks offered the poor 10 r. for a ticket to enter the reporting meeting. But although the kulaks are very strong here, nevertheless the actual kulak population is by no means more than 7 percent. There will probably be fewer disenfranchised people here - up to 5 percent. It is characteristic that after the correction of tax errors related to individual taxation, they turned the stick in the other direction, so that it turned out to be somewhere around 2% with a small amount of individually taxed. I think that in view of the very great prosperity of the upper stratum of the middle peasants, who, in essence, are difficult to distinguish from the kulaks, kulaks must be counted up to 10%. This wealthy elite could not speak at our meetings. If they were present and if they wanted to say what they think, then, of course, there would be much more hostile speeches.

Of the peasants who spoke at these meetings, I was especially impressed by the well-to-do middle peasant Yurin, who spoke in the village of Aleisky. Yurin is surrounded by great respect from the peasantry. He has a good household, which, however, is not suitable for individual taxation. When he spoke, the peasants listened to him with their mouths open. Obviously, this is a local oracle. However, he deserves it. A big man, with a broad forehead, clean-shaven, very peculiar, speaking with feeling and great meaning.

First of all, he expounded with unusual precision the essence of my report, pointing out the relief for the middle peasants that flowed from the government's new course. Then, dwelling on the tax policy of the government, he successfully emphasized that the new taxes, taking too little into account the composition of the family and heavily taxing large-family peasant farms, led to the splitting of these farms into two or three poor peasant farms, which led to a very significant decrease in their productivity and marketability. This, incidentally, was pointed out by some other peasants. It seems to be a really wide phenomenon. Tov. Eikhe, after my conversation with him, agreed that such a phenomenon takes place. And since the fragmentation of peasant farms is the greatest evil, special attention must be paid to this fact. Further, Yurin spoke unusually well against those poor people who do not want to raise their economy, declaring that it is more convenient for them to be poor: “So, de, it’s easier and you don’t need to increase - you don’t pay taxes, and the authorities look at you well.” Yurin, with great eloquence and humor, castigated such inertia and backwardness and declared that with such relaxed moods we would never catch up with Europe. Also interesting is his statement that the peasantry would be very willing to transfer its land and its implements to the government in full so that exemplary state farms would be established on this land. “Set up good state farms, provide a sufficient number of machines, fertilizers, good agronomists, a smart boss, pay us a decent salary, and we will give up all our property and work like workers. Isn't that the best form of socialism." I must say that Yurin is far from the only one among the peasants who put forward such a plan, I don’t know how sincerely. I replied to Yurin that this was the very relaxed mood with which he reproached the poor. I said that it is impossible to think that all agriculture in our country can be organized by the state and therefore to some extent by bureaucratic means, that the population should be able to co-operate itself and put forward real leaders from among themselves.

In any case, Yurin's speech was very bright and very informative, and I noted this in my last speech.

The performances of the farm laborers were curious. There were quite a few of them. Their performances were quite bilious. On the one hand, they are very irritated against the kulaks—the laborers who spoke at the meetings were, of course, an extremely leftist position—but on the other hand, they very sharply attacked Soviet power, exposed various inconsistencies and even abuses, expressed skepticism general attitude towards any superiors. "Any, de, bosses are too proud." In general, it could be said that something like skeptical anarchism dominates among them. However, they willingly go to collective farms. But, of course, the purely poor peasants' and laborers' collective farms turn out to be so weak that they often disintegrate. Hence the new anger. The farm laborers also complain that the active farm laborers are being reprimanded by the kulaks, and they are ceasing to give them work.

The performances of women are very interesting. There were quite a few of them. Judging by the performances, the Altai peasant woman is far from a downtrodden creature. They spoke harshly, attacked the men that they did not give them freedom, did not elect them to councils, did not care about their development, oppressed them with housework, and sometimes beat them.

Complaints, both in notes and in oral statements, are comparatively few. Some complaints were dealt with immediately; while I was listening and talking, Comrade Rezchikov and my personal secretary called all kinds of authorities and witnesses and immediately examined the complaints. Most of them turned out to be completely unfounded. Some could not be sorted out immediately, and if they were of a specific nature, then I handed them over to Comrade Rezchikov for further investigation. In general, I repeat, there were few complaints, two or three in each place. There were, of course, general complaints. They were divided into three categories, since they were directed against the local Soviet authorities: 1) they reproached the fact that the Soviet government often puts people who understand little in this matter in this or that place; 2) they reproached the Soviet government for being too administrative, for being self-willed; 3) reproached for something that cannot be reproached in any way, namely, for the smallness of the budget, for various kinds of economic inconsistencies that stem simply from poverty. Reproaches of the first order should also be attributed to the extreme poverty of people and, in fact, of our entire Union, and even more so of Siberia. By the way, they generally pointed to the lack of specialists in Siberia and their unwillingness to go there. They complain a lot and demand drastic measures. As for the complaints of the second order, no one, in essence, gave direct concrete indications of this kind of autocracy. They also complained about the party members. These complaints are very typical. It was pointed out, for example, that the Party members do not pour their individual economy into collective farm construction, that the Party members themselves exploit their wives, that the Party members drink, play cards, and at the same time the conclusion was invariably made that “if the Party members do this, then we are all a bad example.” ". It turned out, as a general rule, that the idea of a party member was high, that the peasantry considered party members to be exceptional people and became angry when a person called himself a load, but did not draw conclusions from this. Generally speaking, there were almost no hostile notes. True, in one note it was written in the third person: “Do you know, Comrade Lunacharsky, that our peasants say that “when the war comes, we will strangle the communists for taxes.” Obviously, the peasants referred to here are kulaks. Besides, one comes across such statements in Moscow at purely workers' meetings, for example, at the Krasnaya Roza factory, one worker said last year in my report on anti-Semitism: "It's a shame, comrades, that many of our workers : "When there is a war, we will kill the Jews and the Communists." "The workers who spoke after that were indignant at this fact, but by no means denied that such speeches were really heard at the factory. Therefore, I do not at all consider this note a characteristic indicator of the counter-revolutionary mood of the peasantry ...

It should be noted that in terms of grain procurements, the Altai authorities, as well as the peasantry itself, showed a certain mobility. They don't have a big gap. But the railroad cannot pick up bread in time. The two elevators that I saw here are tightly packed, and hundreds of thousands of poods of grain lie in the so-called tabars...

On December 30 we arrived in Krasnoyarsk. In the evening of the same day, I delivered a large report of the government at a huge meeting of railway workers. Basically, at least 4,500 workers gathered in the shop at the expense of local workers. What was noticeable with other railway workers, here, in Krasnoyarsk, came out much brighter. Krasnoyarsk is an old political center where all sorts of exiles with their respective influences settled. In Krasnoyarsk, from the debates, especially from the notes, it was very clearly felt that there were traces of the influence of both the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Mensheviks, and the Trotskyist opposition.

It was also pleasant to note that the workers went to the countryside, got acquainted with the situation in the countryside, and take this rural situation to heart. The workers have a sympathetic attitude towards collective-farm construction. The slogan to stimulate the development of the poor and middle peasants' economy and to strictly distinguish between the cultured middle peasant economy and the exploitative kulak economy meets with an extremely warm welcome. There are few kulak sentiments, but still only in Krasnoyarsk there were notes in which the question was directly posed: "Will we be left without bread if we do not make concessions to the kulak." Questions were often asked that "Trotsky stood up for the fight against the kulak, but now the party has gone on its own," etc. To all this, of course, corresponding rather sharp explanations were given.