An excerpt from a secret Communist Party report on collectivization in Kazakhstan

Title of report: “A review of the Secretariat of the Sovnarkom SSSR on the receipt of statements and appeals, registered from April 1–15, 1930.”

A letter from “the society of Ural Okrug, Kazakh SSR,” copied to SNK [the Council of People’s Commissars], contains a [note of] caution: “The inhabitants who reported the arbitrary rule of local authorities are in terror because ‘we are afraid openly to come forward for the disclosure of outrages’.” [The letter] touches on a series of questions: “. . . [elipses in original] the burden of meat production fell on seredniaks [middle farmers] and bedniaks [poor farmers], not only seizing the surplus, but the pitiable remainder. . . seized meat, especially in the Jangilan raion, has been stored carelessly, so that the stench, arising from the meat as a result of putrefication, prevents anyone from getting near. . .  the burden for the seed fund also fell on the middle and lower-middle farms [khoziastva]. . . in December 1929 and January 1930 local authorities assessed a compulsory [levy] of wool from the population. Then the people sheared their sheep and camels, despite the hard frost, and because of this cut down a considerable quantity of cattle, since the animals, deprived of their natural protection, could not withstand the winter severe cold and died. . . Thanks to these excesses, which were tolerated by local authorities for the procurement of bread, wool, and meat, the number of cattle has fallen by 75%. . . a mass arrest is going on, the Ural camp [izoliator] is overcrowded—a majority of [the arrested] are seredniaks and bedniaks. Many of the workers were turned into kulaks [based on] the arbitrary decisions of individual figures or of the local authorities. That is, they were deprived of voting rights and brought to a court according to Article 28 [of the Agricultural Tax Code, which determined kulak economic status].

At the end of the letter ‘in the interests of restoring the strained trust of the workers —through the fault of local authorities—in Soviet authority’ there is a request for dispatching a commission to expose the excesses and call to account the guilty (directive to the oblast’ committee of the All-Union Communist Party(bolshevik) of the Kazakh ASSR).”

V. Danilov, L. Viola, R. Manning, et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiia i raskulachevanie. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939.  Vol. 2, “Noiabr’ 1929 – Dekabr’ 1930,” p. 389.  Original document in RGAE, F. 7486, op. 37, d. 100, ll. 141–138.