In peacetime, the authorities used fantastic cruelty measures against their people. We needed cheap bread (the currency of the era) and hands for industrialization. But in the middle act of solving this economic problem — mothers who fed their children with snow, and in the end — 7 million starved to death.
Outside the window of the workshop of the Kurgan artist Faina Lanina, there is a monument to the victims of political repression. On the board in the martyrology, “collective farmers without a passport” are mentioned. The last line in winter sinks in the snow. But after each snowfall, people, passing by, scatter a snowdrift, open the letters — “MEMORY FOR AGES”.
The monument hastily made in the 1990s (the whitewashed “oven” under the prison lock) is not liked by many because of its cheapness. Another — a place: the surviving victims of repression wanted to see it from the other side of the block, opposite the windows of the building of the then FSK, the current FSB. In the 1930s, there was a gortheater in its place.
The daughter of a repressed agronomist, now deceased, then in a conversation with me dismissed the reproach to the design right off the bat: “So they burned like in an oven!”
In the once flourishing agricultural land, this poor monument is strangely appropriate.
Kurgan monument to victims of political repression. Photo: Elena Berdnikova
Speech
Faina Lanina's mother, Lanya Stepanova-Reznichenko, who was born either in 1911 (according to her own calculations), or in 1913 (according to her passport), lived in the village of Stroevo, Vargashinsky district, Kurgan district, Ural region — this prototype of today's Ural Federal District.
Double, like English aristocrats, surname — because her father Kondraty died in the First World War, and she lived in the family of her stepfather Alexander. In different villages — Dundino, Stroevo — she called the last name, which is dearer there.
In August 1919 Stroevo was the theater of the Civil War. Brigade commander Vitovt Putna stopped briefly in the village with headquarters, and the 5th Red Army of Tukhachevsky passed nearby.
Lanya was small then, and when she grew up, she was worried that her stepfather himself never rested and did not . On the mowing, they say:
— The cranes flew away, they took away the pauzna [dinner].
That is, go to a new lane.
— Alexander gave grain to the insurance fund; in the villages there were such funds in case of crop failure, and the poor received bread and seeds from it, — says the Kurgan writer Valery Lanin, who wrote down the stories of the same Lani, his mother-in-law Evlampia Alexandrovna.
The real name given to her at baptism — Eulalia, «speaking» in Greek, she fully justified. The documentary «Teschina's stories» were published in the almanac «Tobol», 2010, No. 2.
Lani's relatives on the maternal side were no worse. Her grandfather Alexei Ivankov had 11 sons, 11 daughters-in-law milked a hundred cows, and (Lanin's voice) «the milk was sold to the butter factory for gold money.»
In the hayfield. RIA Novosti archive
The harvest years of 1923‒1926 and the New Economic Policy gave money to the village. In 1925-26, in the free markets of the Trans-Urals, for a ruble, you could buy, to choose from, 20 kilograms of grain, 50 eggs, 3 kilograms of beef, 16 kilograms of poultry meat, 2-3 kilograms of butter.
But the well-being of the majority of the Trans-Urals remained fragile and modest. The annual net profit of the average household in the mid-1920s was 100 rubles, the gross output was 400.
For comparison: the monthly salary
- of a worker was 50‒60 rubles,
- agronomist — 90,
- country doctor — 100.
These and some other figures below are given according to the book «Kulak and AgroGULAG» by the economist and writer Alexander Bazarov, who worked for many years in the state and party archives of the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan and Tyumen regions. This remarkable and, alas, early departed researcher of the peasantry of the 20th century devoted all his books to his mother and “her peers, who spent their whole lives in the collective farm yoke.”
In the 1920s, peasants dominated the population of the country and, taken together, , had exactly what the state needed: bread, money, «working hands.» » />
Peasants near Moscow in the late 1910s. RIA Novosti Archive
«Ejection» and «pumping out»
In early 1927, among other things, due to the support of revolutionary Chinese comrades, the USSR came into conflict with Great Britain, which had had concessions in China since 1860. Behind the rupture of relations with the first empire of the era, the specter of war with an indefinite circle of countries arose. The time began, known to historians as the «military alarm» of 1927.
“In principle, people lived in great tension, undermined by the previous war,” says Valentina Zhiromskaya, Doctor of Historical Sciences, chief researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. — They were worried about the severance of relations, about the painful economic blockade. The external factor pressed. There was a fear of not having time to create a new military industry.
There was also an internal discussion about the ways of industrialization. The party remembered that the Romanov dynasty was shaken by the bread lines in the capital, and Lenin in 1921 in his article «On the food tax» ordered to feed the army and workers.
But the peasants, in view of the military alarm, held back their bread. There was no need to sell it, state prices were low, there was nothing special to buy with money, there were not enough manufactured goods, and over the previous years grain reserves had been created in the villages, which the state immediately called “surplus”. In the new conditions, money was also called surplus. On October 1, 1927, according to the market survey of that time, the «cash surplus» of the peasants of the Ural region was estimated at 19 million rubles.
The party decided to achieve the “throw” of grain for sale at a fixed price and the “pumping out” of money from the countryside. In 1927, the agricultural tax was raised.
On January 7, 1928, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution on «self-taxation». This allegedly voluntary tax for the needs of the life and cultural development of the villages was «charged» for the Urals in the Kremlin: 7.5 million rubles, and the Uralobkom of the CPSU (b) and the Uraloblispolkom distributed the amount by districts. Meetings in the villages met 8-10 times, until starvation, threats, and arrests of dissatisfied people right in the hall did not achieve the adoption of the tax. In a directive dated February 7, 1928, the Uralobkom authorized an illegal but beneficial «increase in the severity of self-taxation on the kulak and wealthy sections of the population.»
So for the first time the party apparatus and the Soviets in peacetime set one part of the peasantry against another: an economically useless «asset» against the «kulaks» and all those who vote «against».
«Here and the Bes!”Voice of Lani:
“We had a scar, a psalmist… will say:
—Alexander Stepanych, stop working like that. This is how they will do it to you, under the root of a teal-chirk …
His stepfather called him Besom, behind his back.
And how they began to take everything away … At first, the taxes were very high — he would count seven thousand, he would take it away. Previously, there were thousands of them, you take ten kopecks — a handkerchief full of nuts … Lie down at home for two hours, again they knock on the window, they call to the village council (“self-taxation”). Got up and went. And just try to say something. Everyone lowered their hands…
Half-brother Michael… Father is being slandered, and he has sold his wealth right and left… he sold sheep, pigs, cows, work and field horses. These — in the village council — were making money! They fought for a certificate how much; the representative will arrive, fill his pocket, leave, another one arrives.
The stepfather was taken (to exile), he is expensive: “Oh, Bes! Here is Bes! And these — the performers who — thought that the man had gone crazy, remembered demons.
Then a lot of people went crazy.
Old man Zhukov, she herself saw, fed a cow with snow. She is already lying, and he is still sticking a bucket in her face.
Unemployed peasants. RIA Novosti Archive
Shabash
Foreboding misfortune hovered over the village for a long time.
In the late 1920s, the voice of the state became ominous:
“Three years of harvest were not in vain. … the wealthy strata of the countryside got this year the opportunity to turn around in raw materials, meat products, etc., keeping grain products in order to drive up prices. True, the kulak cannot be considered the main holder of grain products, but he is the economic authority in the countryside.»
This is from the appeal of the Central Committee of the Party of February 13, 1928 «The first results of the procurement campaign and the further tasks of the party: to all organizations of the CPSU (b)». Signed by Stalin on behalf of the Central Committee. His summary:
“Extort money from the village using the laws on self-taxation, peasant loans, and the fight against moonshine.”
In 1928, non-agricultural incomes of peasants, small livestock and special types of agricultural activities were taxed.
Edited art. 107 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR «Malicious increase in prices for goods by buying, concealing or not releasing them on the market.» They began to evict “bread hiders” from the Ural region along it. In June 1928, Antonov, Leonov and two Ivanovs, as well as Moses Khudyakov, were evicted for five years, reports the Krasny Kurgan newspaper. Dozens of local publications in the RSFSR publish streams of denunciations of fellow villagers from anonymous village correspondents with call signs like «Red», «Random», «Passer».
Visiting commissioners in the villages are hysterically withdrawing «grain surpluses». They are looking for them, together with rural activists, in other people's barns, sheds and imports (food warehouses).
The “malicious bread clampers” are called in for “interrogations” in the village councils, some have their beards torn out.
And 1928 was a fruitful year. In 1927 they prepared 619 million poods, in 1928 — 644 million poods. According to the logic of the state, the tearing of beards was justified.
Peasants work the land on a team of oxen. RIA Novosti Archive
In November 1928, the Kurgan branch of the Selcreditsoyuz decided not to lend to «kulak and prosperous households.» In February 1929, employees of rural financial cooperatives were criminalized for lending to «enemies». Later, 20 employees of the district system of the Selcreditsoyuz were put on trial «for negligent attitude to business and a conciliatory attitude towards the class enemy.» In May, it was decided to recover all loans previously issued to the «kulaks» ahead of schedule. In June, a draconian fine was introduced for non-delivery of bread in the amount of five times the amount concealed.
Summer 1929 — «carnivals» and boycotts.
Comsomol members nailed boards with the word «Boycott» on the walls and corners, and sometimes on the windows, of «kulak» houses.
Boycotted farms are denied state insurance, agronomic assistance and maintenance, and the right to use forests. It is forbidden to build and buy agricultural machinery.
The clergy is equated with the kulaks: in the Kurgan region, the tax on income from the fulfillment of requirements is 100%. Priests are (in vain) forced to preach in the church either the surrender of bread or the absence of God.
In the vicinity of the village of Baturino, a “bread-procurement carnival” takes place. In 1817, Archimandrite Antonin (Kapustin), the head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the Holy Land and the acquirer of almost all the lands owned by the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society in Israel, was born in Baturino. In 1929, a string of carts with Komsomol members disguised as “kulaks” drove through four villages around the homeland of the ascetic.From the report of the Kurgan district executive committee in the summer of 1929: «The kulaks cannot withstand the pressure of the Soviet public, they are selling their property and fleeing the village.» During the first three quarters of 1929, the OGPU in the Ural region arrested about 1,000 people in cases related to grain procurement. During the same period, in the Mishkinsky district of the Kurgan region (then the Chelyabinsk district), «the people's judge and the secretary … worked continuously without days of rest from 8–9 a.m. to 2–3 a.m.,» Alexander Bazarov cites data from checking the activities of the court in the book » Kulak and AgroGULAG. They condemned 119 peasants each month under Article 107.
Circular of the People's Commissariat of Justice No. 22/ss of October 5, 1929: “The government instructed the NKJ and the OGPU to step up measures of repression up to executionsagainst the kulaks and other counter-revolutionary elements who are fighting against the measures of the Soviet government.
On November 3, 1929, Stalin in the article “The Year of the Great Turning Point” declared that “unprecedented success in agricultural construction” had been achieved, and sent to the countryside, «the workers managed to convince them of the advantage of a large-scale collective farm over an individual small one.»
The same month: the district executive committees of the Ural region banned the slaughter of livestock. Sanctions — up to confiscation of property. But in the 80 days between December 1, 1929 and February 20, 1930, in the Kurgan district, the peasants slaughtered and disbanded 63 thousand head of cattle, 36 thousand horses, 65 thousand sheep.
Village women thresh bread with flails. RIA Novosti Archive
To Scrupulous London
In Siberia, and especially in the Trans-Urals, parting with cows had the overtone of the collapse of a dream. The land of almost three thousand lakes and the basin of the Siberian Nile, Tobol — water meadows, grassy floodplains. Dairy Paradise. The local product — butter — is exported.
In 1907, numerous cooperative butter factories from the Urals to Altai merged into the Union of Siberian Butter Artels (SSMA) with a center in Kurgan. The founder of the union, Alexander Balakshin, registered the company in London in order to directly sell on the world's main market for «delicate goods».
Until 1914, Siberian cooperators competed with the Finnish cooperative Valio and the Australian Anchor.
Balakshin tried very hard to improve the unstable quality of Siberian oil; a pupil of the exiled Decembrists, friends of his merchant father, believed that the task of the Russian commercial and industrial class was to enable the peasants to develop their farms with the help of credit, consumer and productive cooperation in order to grow on their growth.
SSMA ceased to exist in 1918, Balakshin died in London in 1921, and in 1923 the cooperative Maslosoyuz was revived in the Trans-Urals. Cow herds have almost recovered: 388 thousand heads in 1926 against 429 thousand in 1916. In 1927, the average individual household in the district had four cows and two horses. And the export of butter from the region to Britain continued until the very «Stalinist collectivization», writes the economist Bazarov.
But since 1928, the so-called “cow” of the economy began to decline: “In the winter of 1929-1930, the Ural region turned into a continuous slaughterhouse.” By February 20, 1930, there were only 155,000 cows in the district.
The Krasny Kurgan newspaper is full of advertisements about the so-called «free livestock». The owners abandoned cows and horses, either running away or not having the means to feed the animals. They regretted it — they let it go at random.
But they did not regret the peasants themselves.
«What can I serve?»
In the Vargashinsky district — the same one where Lanya lived in the village of Stroevo — the district committee of the CPSU (b) at the beginning of 1930 adopted a universally issued directive: to prohibit «kulaks and members of their families» from leaving or resettlement, leaving livestock without food, and families without food. funds.
Voice of Lani:
“And they gathered me for exile … A friend ran in the evening, out of breath … And her brother-in-law pinned her down:“ You know, he says, Ignashovs, Perfilovs, Gukov, Pozdnyakov, Markov will be taken away this night. And you were equated with them — one family, imbued with their spirit. You run … Early in the morning, early. Mariyka will carry firewood to the station, fall into her greenhorns. Sleigh with railings.
In the morning we arrived with Mariyka in Vargashi. I stand. Freezing. This is how the house stands, here … obliquely. The first is a huge two-story, wide staircase to the terrace. The second house is smaller. I climbed onto the terrace, knocked on the door, no one came out. She pulled — open, a cold corridor … She entered, there were three more doors: to the left, to the right, and no sound. Eh, I'll go straight. I open it — it's warm there, fathers! — and behind the wall a childish conversation. So what? I knock, I stand. No one opens, I'll knock again. Then I hear a woman's voice: “Wait a minute, I'll put on a dressing gown.”
— Please! Come in, — such a lady opened …
I cried. She put her hand on my shoulder: “What can I serve?”
— Where can I land? A roof over your head and a piece of bread.
— Take off your coat.
But they didn’t take off their shoes. Everything is in carpets, the bedroom is hung with a silk curtain, a table with scribbles. Sela.
— Calm down. — Removed the shawl. — What braids!
And they all knew what was going on.”
Lanya “landed” for a long time in the family of paramedic Ivan Ivanovich Savchenko, whose wife, “such a lady” Antonina Pavlovna, then blessed Lanya with her icon for a love marriage with her fiancé, a poor guy Ivan Sarychev.
Ivan Sarychev and Lanya. Photos from the family archive
Lanya made her husband an accountant, and he became an amateur artist himself. In the 1970s and 1980s he painted nostalgic pictures of the ideal peasant life. His works «Mill», «Jordan», «Threshing grain on the current with a tractor», «Shrovetide», «Games for Easter» and others are kept in the Moscow Museum of Naive Art.
— I told my dad to he painted a picture about dispossession, because when he was a clerk in the village council, he saw all these tears, but he did not paint a single one, — says the eldest daughter of Lani and Ivan, Faina Ivanovna Lanina.
Here she is — a professional artist who graduated in the 1960s from the Sverdlovsk Art College. I.D. Shadra. But she did not paint a picture about dispossession.
Winter (Hay Carriage). 1977. Painting by Ivan Sarychev «>
Faina and Valery Lanina, in her studio. Photo: Elena Berdnikova
End
The repressive apparatus was numerically unprepared for such a large-scale secret special operation, and on February 5, 1930, the Uralobkom of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided “to send responsible party and Soviet workers to the district departments of the OGPU for permanent work” — 90 people.
Protocols meetings of the poor and middle peasants, which decided whose families to fill in the charged figures, were classified from 1930 to 1990.
The decisions of the village councils were hastily approved by the district executive committees — along with the personal cards of the “kulaks”. Only the head of the family was entered on the card. The commandants of the assembly points and, later, the echelons took the household members by the head. The lists will be written on the way.
And then came the morning of the “rise” of families. The OGPU was responsible for security, escort and traffic schedule. The convoys moved from the villages to the collection points. For a day or two people walked, seeing off their fellow villagers. But Komsomol members sometimes took away good clothes from the deportees, and in return they gave away rags, writes Alexander Bazarov in his book “Kulak and AgroGULAG”.
According to the «second category» to the Tobolsk transit point from the Kurgan district were «shipped» — a word from the documents of that special operation —
7740 people:
- 2292 men,
- 2424 women,
- 3024 children
(the eviction of the “fist” turned out to be the eviction of babies).
The figures were found and published by Alexander Bazarov on at the turn of the 1990s.
Echelons left with a step of two days: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15 March. Echelon does not mean «row of wagons». There was no railway to Tobolsk yet, part of the journey was done on carts.
In the Chelyabinsk district, they were allowed to leave 500 rubles per family, take food for three months and one collar.
The first and most numerous (1325 people) echelon moved from the Makushinsky and Lopatinsky districts on Saturday, March 1, 1930. The first half of March in the Trans-Urals is winter. And according to the old style, it is also a calendar one.
A quote from the two Gospels, from Matthew and from Mark: “Pray that your flight does not happen in winter.” Matthew adds, «and on the Sabbath.» The end of time for peasant Russia has come true.
RIA News Photo Archive
< /p>“Troubles”
In the party archive of the Sverdlovsk region for almost 60 years, a document found by the conductor N. Semakina from the Zuevka station of the Gorky railway was kept under wraps. After passing train number 503, there was a note on the rails with the text:
“We are being taken to no one knows where, 45 people in a wagon, they don’t let us out into the air, there is not enough water not only to wash ourselves, but even to drink, there is not enough boiling water, you can’t even beg for snow.
Why we were thrown into this dark and a stinking car, which is worse than a prison … if anyone could look into our car, then the stone heart would shudder, and they would see such a horror that savages do not know.
Shame on putting infants in prison but our wagon is worse than a prison. There is nowhere to sit and lie down, for the first two days we rode completely without water and fed the children with snow …
Shame on you, cultured people!”
Both cultured and uncultured people after 92 years may ask whether the peasants themselves were guilty of their fate? After all, the Trans-Ural farmers did not really prevent Putna and Tukhachevsky from defeating Kappel and Kolchak. Why were the first two, the Red Commander and the Marshal, as a natural gratitude for the services to communism, to be shot on the night of June 12, 1937, and the peasants to remain unaffected?
And didn’t they themselves touch someone else’s land, having received a “repartition of the land” on the eve of the sowing of 1918 from the first Soviet government (this is how the Soviet government is called in Siberia, which existed for six months before the arrival of the Czechoslovak Corps and Kolchak)?
“By the sowing of 1918, the first Soviet government had cut the nationalized lands here for the peasants, which previously belonged to merchants and wealthy peasants,” says Nikolai Tolstykh, a local historian from the Trans-Urals, a bibliographer of the Vargashinsky Central Library. These large allotments of land were formed, among other things, from those estates that were prepared under Nicholas I for the so-called «poor nobles» from the European part of Russia. By resettling them, the tsar wanted to solve the problem of lack of land in the center of the country. They determined 80 acres per noble family. But they took advantage of class rights and refused to go. And the serfs could not be resettled in Siberia, they had a landowner. And the state, personally free peasants from the Pskov, Voronezh and Smolensk provinces went here en masse with great desire and received 15 acres per male soul. But when the power changed, under Kolchak the lands were returned to the owners. Not everyone liked it.»
«By the middle of 1919, the white authorities faced organized sabotage of their actions by the main group of the population — the peasantry,» writes local historian Oleg Vinokurov in the book «The Battle for Tobol: 1919 in the Kurgan region.”
By the standards of peasants from the overpopulated provinces of European Russia, 15 acres is wealth. State peasants settled a good part of Siberia. They were also called state-owned, or black-lined, black-arable. The latter comes from the already epic «black-peasants», known since the time of Kievan Rus, these subjects of the prince as a prototype of the state.
In the early 1930s, their descendants died the age-old craving, greed and tenderness, passion for the land .
—In the 1920s, the peasants could not be dragged away from the land, and in the 1930s they began to leave it and go to the cities, says Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Valentina Zhyromskaya.