Письмо Сталину о межнациональных отношениях в Казахстане Letter to Stalin about interethnic relations in Kazakhstan

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<<Stamp:  Technical Secretariat…20230…must be returned>> 

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To the Secretaries of the CC VKP(b), comrades Stalin, Kaganovich and Postyshev.  To the Chairman of the TsKK [Central Control Commission] VKP(b), comrade Rudzutak.

1521/s

21 August 1932

Without pretending to thoroughly illuminate the situation, I consider it necessary to report to You a number of facts and impressions that provide materials describing the situation in Kazakhstan.   

I will begin with the question of relations between nationalities.  I consider their condition terribly unpredictable.  Manifestations of great-power chauvinism are quite numerous, they often occur in quite acute, sometimes pogrom-like, forms, and they encounter such a trivial rebuff that one may speak, without any fear of exaggeration, of a debauchery of great-power chauvinism in Kazakhstan.

Along with the fact of widespread propagation among the Russian population of Kazakhstan, including the railway workers and collective farmers, of a disdainful, great-power attitude, and often a poorly concealed feeling of hatred toward the Kazakhs, my statement is supported by a number of exceptionally insolent manifestations of a purely zoological hatred toward the Kazakhs like incidents of unprovoked murder of Kazakhs by Russians; I am not speaking here of “innocent” things like shoving aside Kazakhs who generously give way to different “government representatives” including railway-car conductors or controllers at dock landings.

I will cite a number of facts that have become known to me.

Secretary of the Krai Committee VKP(b), comrade Kuramyslov, once told me in discussion that in a raion in Karagandin oblast on the basis of widely disseminated rumors that

<<Stamp:  material available 12 December 1951 VI>>

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Kazakhs were allegedly murdering Russians, several collective farmers murdered in advance, so to speak, a Kazakh they encountered on the steppe.

At Miasokhladostroi in Semipalatinsk a group of Russian workers organized a mass beating of Kazakh workers just because they are Kazakhs.  One Russian worker who took part in the beating of the Kazakhs was also beaten up (The Prosecutor in Semipalatinsk told me about this.).

In Taldy-Kurgan raion, Alma-Ata oblast, a number of great-power sneak attacks were uncovered that sometimes spilled over into outright pogrom attacks.  So, for example in the village soviet Ainabulak, in the mid-July, a band of cattle thieves stole 6 horses.  To liquidate the band, a komotriad [communist unit] of 7 communists and komsomols, and 3 militiamen (all Russians) headed by secretary of the party cell and Raikom member, Ivashchenko, was dispatched.

On arriving in the Kazakh aul No. 15 in Balkhash raion this unit carried out a genuine pogrom.  With cries of “beat the Kazakhs,” this band of black hundreds with party and komsomol cards burst into the aul shooting, conducted a brutal massacre, illegal searches, the “confiscation” of property, etc.  When the OGPU organs arrested this scum, the Ainabulak party cell tried to secure the release of those arrested.

In the same raion, according to a report of the head of the organizational department of the Alma-Ata Obkom, comrade Truntaev, we have these facts: 

1.  In state farm for medicinal crops No. 79, Kazakh workers were systematically beaten by Russian workers.  The state farm director, VKP(b) member, comrade Kucherenko , considers these “small misunderstandings.”   

2.  The chairman of the Malogorsky collective farm, during a discussion of the request of aul No. 15 for horses to help during sowing, openly declared, “For 14 years we have been helping the Kazakhs, yet nothing

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comes of it,” and the request of aul No. 15 was declined despite that they had the opportunity to help.

3.  One afternoon, under the eyes of everyone in the raion center, a Russian beat a Kazakh man and woman to unconsciousness.  It took two hours to get the injured accepted into the hospital because no one wanted to help them.

4.  In the Altyn-Emel state farm, the Russian chairman of the workers’ committee beats the Kazakh workers.

5.  In the same state farm, the severed head of a Kazakh was found and no one in the state farm raised alarms about it.  And the director of the state farm, a party member, to the question put to him by comrade Truntaev about how it could happen that he did not react to this extraordinary fact, answered, “You know, I’m up to my neck in work and had no time…”

One can add examples from the life and work of Taldy-Kurgan raion.  I will limit myself to one.  During the sowing campaign a transfer of seeds 80 kilometers from the raion center was arranged in the following way:  Kazakh men and women were mobilized and each carried 2 puds of seeds.  The Kazakhs were accompanied by Russians acting as supervisors.  The organizers of this procession purposefully led it past the raion committee.  After the raion committee intervened, horses were found to transfer the seeds. 

In light of these facts, it gets lost that at worker meetings where Kazakhs participate, the question of the need to translate the speeches into the Kazakh language is often put to a vote and decided negatively by a majority of Russian votes (the Aiaguz depot, Turk-Sib railroad); Russian machinists sharply

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protest against the assignment of Kazakhs as their conductors in railcars (the same place); or the separation of the Kazakhs into a special brigade for the heavier work in some of the mixed collective farms.

The growth of great-power attitudes, not unexpectedly, also facilitates the horrible destruction, starvation, and poverty that has struck a significant part of the Kazakh aul.  And since any explanatory work on this question is lacking, which will be particularly noted below, the facts about the poverty of the Kazakhs, the facts about the theft of food by starving Kazakhs etc. help reinforce the widely held view among the population that Kazakhs are lazy, freeloaders, thieves, and in general, a good-for-nothing people. 

Of course, all this, just like the fact of impoverishment due to various reasons of a large part of the Kazakh aul, could not but bolster the growth of local nationalism, too.  If I am unable to cite in my letter facts of clear cut displays of local nationalism, then it is exclusively because my observation of this question was made more difficult by a lack of knowledge of the Kazakh language, and also because such facts are difficult to uncover by a person not directly connected with the daily operation of the local party organization.

According to comrade Truntaev’s message, in this same Taldy-Kurgan raion there was a case when a Kazakh agronomist, Chuakpaev, refused to report to the director of the state farm declaring that he “will not subordinate himself to western policy.”

The chairman of the workers’ committee of state farm No. 79, the Kazakh Shanshaliev (he finished the VTsSPS higher trade-union courses), expressed nationalist attitudes, declaring at a cell meeting of the state farm, “I was taught

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to fight the Russians and I will fight to the end…a national dictatorship must be introduced immediately.”

On the growth of local nationalism the workers of both the OGPU and the Krai committee have spoken to me.

And how could it be otherwise?  It has long been known that the growth of great-power nationalism feeds the growth of local nationalism.

How is the Krai party organization fighting against all of this, especially against great-power chauvinism[?]  Maybe I am insufficiently informed, but my impression is that the struggle is completely inadequate.  Particularly inadequate, in my view, is the struggle with great-powerism.

So, in particular, the facts about Taldy-Kurgan raion were exposed only recently by the Oblast committee even though these facts are not new, and in general facts about distortions of the party line in connection with grain procurements in this raion were known to the raion leadership and were exposed 2 or 3 months ago.  It is also typical that all these facts were uncovered by comrade Truntaev and not by the new raion leadership.  Yet, not one line about any of these facts appeared in the press.

The great-power sneak attack at the Semipalatinsk Miasokhladostroi was not discussed in either the Oblast committee or the Oblast KK.  There was no press campaign about this question.  In particular “Priirtysh Pravda,” the organ of the Eastern-Kazakhstan Oblast Committee did not refer to this fact at all in its pages.  And the organ of the Krai committee, “Kazakhstan Pravda,” for an entire month when I had the opportunity to follow it, did not once carry [an article] on the urgent question of great-power chauvinism.

I will move on to the question of the out-migrations of the Kazakh population, of famine, and the struggle with these phenomena.

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As everyone knows, for a number of reasons, a significant number of Kazakh farms have begun to migrate from the locations and raions of their residence.  Entire auls have moved off.  Often they moved in a panic, discarding their property.  The number of such migrants from Kazakhstan, according to rough figures, is reaching 150-180 thousand farmers.  In addition, there have been and are a large number of people who wander from place to place within Kazakhstan itself.  On the way, the migrants have lost and used up the remnants of their property, and by spring of this year this mass in its overwhelming majority appeared completely ravaged, knocked out from normal economic life, a hulking, exhausted, and sick people.

The result is mass poverty and vagrancy among the Kazakhs, hunger, deaths from hunger, epidemics, homeless children, and other painful phenomena.

The struggle with the results of this devastation is one of the largest economic and political tasks of the Kazakh party organization.  It is absurd to think that this enormous task may be resolved by the apparatus without involving society at large.  In the meantime, how this work is being carried out is in no way assisting the mobilization of society.  To begin with, all the work on this is conducted in secret.  Of course, I am not suggesting making noise in the press about this, but it is impossible to conduct this work secretly; I am not speaking here of the fact that it is absurd to think that it is possible to keep mass poverty, homeless children, starved corpses on the streets of Semipalatinsk, the railway stations, and Pribalkhashstroi a secret.  Meanwhile, the effects of the complete absence of any attempt to organize proletarian society for a struggle with these negative phenomena, an attempt to seriously inform the public, without noise and without panic, about the actual 

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state of affairs, and these incidents are quite extensive, when to all these difficult phenomena there is only indifference.  A “theory” is even being formulated that the Kazakh, they say, lacks the ability for productive activity, that he prefers to do nothing and to die of hunger than, say, work at Pribalkanstroi.  Only this can explain the frequent instances when homeless children, who are already in orphanages and boarding schools, have died of hunger because in these homes the apparatus cannot ensure the necessary food (in Kazakhstan oblast), or when in Urdzhar raion, Alma-Ata oblast, as a result of criminal inactivity on the part of the raion apparatus, in the course of fifteen days in 225 nomad farms, 128 people died of hunger notwithstanding that both funds and food were made available to settle these nomads.

In as much as it is “not acceptable” to speak of these difficult occurrences there is evidence that at the East Kazakhstan oblast Congress of Soviets in Semipalatinsk not a single question was raised, and there was not one speech on this theme despite the fact that East Kazakhstan oblast was one that suffered most and that in Semipalatinsk itself there were mass instances of death from hunger on the streets.

It seems to me that the disposition not to speak about this difficult situation is not an accident.  To a significant degree it reflects the tradition created in Kazakhstan “to say little about unpleasant things.”  Therefore, the wholesale silence about great-power chauvinism is obvious and, it seems to me, therefore, little is said about excesses.  But in the meantime, you won’t shake up the organization without a little noise.  But a shakeup in regard to not allowing excesses in the future, it seems to me, is a glaring necessity.    

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As a result of the measures taken by the Kazakhstan party organization since the spring, the migrants have begun to return to Kazakhstan.  The plan proposes that 35 thousand people be accepted from neighboring krais and republics and, according to figures from 1 August, over 73,000 farmers have already returned in organized and unorganized ways.  To settle these farmers, significant funds have been released.  True, instances have been established where these funds are expended not as intended, and sometimes simply stolen.  But the basic shortcoming, in my view, is that there is no well-conceived plan of aid and settlement of this devastated population. For example, there is a struggle with child homelessness, but there is no struggle with child mortality overall.  No association to feed the children has been organized although formally they are not orphans (they have parents), but are unsupervised, hungry, and sick from lack of food.       

Food assistance is being dispensed, but no social work has been organized, and the food assistance is often deprived of any productive character.  And what is even more alarming is that all the work to render assistance, it seems to me, is saturated, if one can put it that way, with the here and now, without a thought for the future.  And it is necessary to consider this future.

The fact of the matter is that, first off, the number of farmers who find themselves in a condition of vagrancy within raions and between raions has not been tallied up at all.  This mass of farmers is not receiving any organized assistance and is simply eating through and ravaging these fortunate raions where the migrations are occurring.

Second, in connection with the food-supply difficulties in a number of raions—and in several of them the outlook for the harvest is also poor—as noted in figures of the GPU, there is a new wave of out-migrations underway.  Thousands of new farms are also abruptly pulling up stakes and migrating 

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into raions rumored to be well-off.  On the road, the migrants suffer enormous deprivations and are going hungry, there are cases of death due to hunger, children in particular are dying in large numbers.  There is plundering of settlements (obviously not only by migrants), theft of cattle, petty thievery, etc.

The danger consists in the fact that if a whole system of measures is not worked out, and in very short order, the elements will become overwhelming and significantly large sums will be required to liquidate what has been created as result of this situation.

As to the sums.  Of course neither I nor anyone else has counted any of this up.  But for me one thing is clear, to overcome all of this will require very large sums.

In conclusion, about a serious illness in the life of the aul organization.  In the Kazakh aul the de facto institution of “belsendi” has been created.  This is the Kazakh name for aul activists who participate in carrying out campaigns.  Without fear of exaggeration, I find it necessary to certify that in the person of these belsendi the former “atkaminer” has been reborn in the Kazakh aul, but on a different basis.  Atkaminerism is an institution created in their time by the beys.  It resembles the retinue of the bey, idlers who do nothing but live of the population thanks to their intimacy with the bey.  Of course, among the Kazakh aul activists there are many honest poor peasants and laborers, dedicated to the party and state, who have fought the beys, the basmachi etc.  But given that no education work was undertaken with these activists, many of the activists were reborn as distinctive “Soviet atkaminers.”  All day long they ride around on horseback with whips     

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in hand doing nothing, and they receive the whips at the expense of the collective farms just like administrators.  In the collective farm, “The New Path,” they represent a uniform disaster, the following facts speak of the scale of this disaster, Kastek raion during the collection campaign in 1931, 50 people were rushed in as belsendi.  In the collective farm Er-Nazarov—65.  It is necessary to bear in mind that in these collective farms working horses number 300-400.  Or else they simply eat through the collective farms.  In Aiaguz raion, in one of the collective farms, in the past, as they say, it was quite strong, in 1931 the collective farm leaders with the participation of the Raion collective farm union and a number of other raion workers ate up over one thousand head of various cattle.  In Ilii raion, in three collective farms, over three hundred head of large cattle and horses there were eaten up in the same manner.         

Instances have been established where the collective farm leaders, at the expense of the collective farms, made gifts of lambs and mares (to eat) even to krai-level workers.

On this I end my undeniably long letter.

 [signature] Aronshtam.

5 copies

1 to comrade Stalin

1 to comrade Kaganovich

1 to comrade Postyshev

1 to comrade Rudzutak

1 to file

20 August 1932