The Nationalities Problem Soviet Administration by Rudolf Schlesinger

Author:Rudolf Schlesinger [Schlesinger, Rudolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136281273
Google: HcP7AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T05:54:07+00:00

The examples quoted show that the kulak is cleverly taking advantage of the historical and traditional forms of banditry and horse and cattle theft in order to undermine and wreck the collective farms. This kulak manoeuvre has been exposed in good time. At present, the judicial organs of North Ossetia are applying the full severity of the decree of August 7, 1932, to the class enemy—the kulak trying to camouflage his counter-revolutionary activity by environmental and national peculiarities.

We have dwelt so far mainly on the clan survivals, which are exploited by the kulaks in their open struggle outside the collective farm. Let us try now to show the negative effect of the environmental survivals on relations outside the kolkhoz.

In collective farm life to-day there are still many survivals from clan life which have an adverse effect on kolkhoz production. At times kulaks succeed in creeping into the collective farms to organize sabotage, the loot of kolkhoz property, of the harvest and so forth. Thus the dispossessed kulak Bedoyev crept into the Molotov kolkhoz and obtained, within a month, the post of brigade leader. From the very first, he began to organize the most backward collective farmers, who were his kinsmen, for thefts of maize directly from the field. He organized his group in utmost secrecy; when four of its members were subsequently caught with the stolen kolkhoz maize, they stubbornly concealed the identity of the organizer of the thefts— their kulak kinsman Bedoyev, who among them enjoyed the authority of a clan elder.

In the judicial practice in North Ossetia, cases were very frequent when a witness at court retracted from his original testimony exposing a kinsman ‘of his own’, for fear of bringing upon himself the censure of the clan, and also owing to ideological persuasion by the ‘honoured’ elders claiming to be the exclusive guardians and interpreters of the customs and traditions of the past.

These dark reactionary forces have still such an effect on the backward collective farmers that these sometimes retract at court from their earlier truthful evidence. This cultivates perjury, impeding the application of the most important Soviet laws. The kulaks make wholesale use of it. Thus a former kulak of the Nogir village, having crept into the kolkhoz, stole a bullock cart, and this was confirmed at court by the witness Abayev and several others. But when the ex-kulak was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, his kinsmen were seized with excitement; day and night they were calling on the witnesses, ‘persuading’ them that, by relentless force of custom, they must resolutely retract from their evidence, or else, it was said, they could not escape the blood feud. All this was done in extreme secrecy. [And] the witnesses, unable to withstand this reactionary pressure, informed the provincial judicial authorities that their evidence before the court of the first instance had not been true, and asked for the abrogation of the sentence.

It is clear, therefore, that during the last years the kulaks have made use of perjury as a definite form of class struggle.

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