Leaflet of the Central Committee of the All-Union Peasant Party. March 25, 1929

Leaflet of the Central Committee of the All-Union Peasant Party. March 25, 1929

Source: The tragedy of the Soviet village. Collectivization and dispossession. Documents and materials Volume 1 May 1927 - November 1929. Moscow ROSSPEN 1999. Pp. 572-573.
Archive: GARF. F. 1235. Op. 141. D. 312. L. 4. Certified copy.

№ 172

Secret.

Tt. Kalinin, Kiselev and the OGPU

All-Union Peasant Party. Central Committee (CC VKP)

Comrade peasants!

For several years now, our country has been tightly covered by the cast-iron cap of dictatorship, under which all living things are suffocating.

During the life of Lenin, there was a time when the edges of this cap were somewhat raised and refreshing streams of air and rays of light found access to us. True, even then the life of a peasant was unsweetened, but still there was a glimmer of hope for a better future, for Lenin more than once shouted at the party satraps: “Do not dare to command a peasant!” Now the muzhik is commanded by all and sundry, from the people's commissar to the last member of the Komsomol. In no other European country is the position of the peasant so bleak as in the USSR. The government of every other country in every possible way encourages the rise of the peasants' well-being, and the results are the most favorable. In Denmark, for example, half of the farms have five or more cows. In our country, not only such farms, but even less powerful ones, are immediately declared kulak, and persecution begins against them. Their owners are disenfranchised, taxed exorbitantly, their children expelled from schools. We have to be a beggar, a poor man, a semi-proletarian, living off loans from the state and not paying any taxes - only then will you be considered a pillar of Soviet power. The diligent, well-managed peasant, whom Lenin occasionally mentioned, is now considered an enemy of the state. Batu's policy during the Tatar invasion was much more reasonable than the policy of the Soviet government. And remember what this government promised you in the first year of the revolution. Promised freedom and equality (given slavery and lack of rights). It promised contentment and satiety (it gave unprecedented poverty and unemployment). It promised joy and brotherhood (it gave despondency, hatred and anger).

Comrade peasants! Taking advantage of your plight, some underground agitators are trying to arm you against the workers, pointing out that the workers are responsible for all the abominations that are happening in the country. Don't believe it. They deliberately want to quarrel with the workers. Workers in the USSR are now as deprived of rights as you are. They are just as deceived as you. The Communist Party rules in the name of the workers, but it does not question them. Stalin and Molotov rule in the name of the Communist Party, but they do not ask it either, acting through a corrupt party official. The Communist Party itself has now absorbed so many sycophants and crooks that it has become a collection of all sorts of rabble that stifles the voices and actions of the eccentric Communists who have remained honest.

Such a party is a herd ready to obey the whip of any driver. For most of today's communists, a party card is a ration card. And such and such a party is building socialism. This party wants to make all the peasants proletarians, it wants to drive them into its collective farms and state farms, transferring the peasant lands and property there.

Comrade peasants! The same agitators call you back to the monarchy, pointing out that under the tsar there were no such oppressions against the peasants as the Soviet government inflicts. Know that a return to tsarism would mean a dictatorship no better than Stalin's, that the country would then [be] covered in blood. Stalin's policy provokes a civil war. This war is already beginning. The authorities set one part of the village against another and wants to hold on to this strife, like tsarism does on Jewish pogroms.

Don't be provoked.

Don't waste your energy on trifles.

Get ready for a serious struggle, for democracy, for universal suffrage, for freedom of speech, assembly and association, for the inviolability of the person and home, for everything that the present government has taken from you.

The days of Stalin's dictatorship are numbered. Our country no longer wants Stalinist socialism, just as Europe did not want it. The economy of the country is dying. Food is getting scarce. The material base of power is crumbling. Your task, comrade peasants, should be, firstly, without openly speaking out against the regime for the time being, to detain houses in every possible way and not to release food and raw materials to the market; secondly, in the local organization of honest and sensible peasants into secret cells of the Peasants' Party. When the time comes, the Central Committee of the Peasant Party will notify you of the need to come out in an organized manner and change the government.

Down with the dictatorship!

Long live the power of the freely elected assembly of people's delegates!

Long live the Peasant Party!

Long live the true alliance between the peasants and the workers!

This appeal is requested to be reprinted and passed on to others.