One of the most tragic pages in the chronicle of our country and region are the political repressions. The introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) managed to eliminate to a certain extent social tension within society, but the fly wheel of repressions in the late 1920s assumed ominous and cruel forms, especially with regard to the industrialization of the country, which were consolidated by instructions of party and government. In order to be able to better understand that tragic time, we have to go back to the documents of those years and define who was the actual initiator of the genocide against the own people, the causer of cruel persecutions that started on the eve of the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Let us now return to history. The General Secretary of the All-Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks (VKP (B)) - Stalin – and his devotees began to enforce a policy of relentless dekulakization (disappropriation of big farmers; translator’s note) and the creation of kolkhoz farms by use of oppressive methods. In January 1928 yet he sends telegrams to all local party workers, in which he claims to apply most radical measures against big farmers. About that time Stalin betakes himself to Siberia, where he requests his orders to be carried out without delay.
The General Secretary irrevocably defined his thesis about the liquidation of the big farming community as a class during the All-Russian Conference of Agrarians and Marxists on the 27th of December 1929. This assumption was fortified by the instruction of the Polit Bureau of the Central Committee of the VKP (B) on the 5th of December 1930 „About the pacing of collectivization and supporting measures with the build-up of kolkhoz farms“. On the 30th of January 1930 the Polit Bureau of the Central Committee of the VKP (B) passed the Decree „About measures to liquidate big farms in regions of extensive collectivization“.
On the 1st of February 1930 the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR „About measures of consolidation of socialist structures with regard to agriculture in areas of extensive collectivization and the fight against the big farmers’ community” was passed. This decree was followed by Order N° 4421 of the OGPU deputy chairman - Yagoda „About the involvement of the OGPU in the execution of collectivization measures, the arrest of big farmers and the inexorable oppression of any kind of renitency against the plans of the government“. Hence, early in the 1930s, the idea of repressions became a document, a res judicata, and the machinery of oppression on-site was given the complete freedom of action. Mass disappropriations were initiated, accompanied by unveiled pillage and mistreatment of people.
V.G. Sirotinin, member of the social organization „Krasnoyarsk Organization of Historic Illumination and Human Rights „Memorial“, records that, according to what has been found in archival documents collected by Memorial co-worker A.I. Frolova, 2356 farms (10031 individuals) were dispossessed in Kuragino District. Endless treks, trains, barges set off to take the Siberian farmers to the Angara Region, the Yeniseisk North, the mines of Artemovsk, where hunger, cold and hard labor were already awaiting them. All social classes of population were affected by repressions: physicians and teachers, farmers and workers, scientific workers and clergymen, functionaries of party and Soviets. The inhabitants of our district were not excepted. The victims of political repressions were called the repugnant name of “enemies of the people”. The inhabitants of the hamlet of Rezyeszhee became victims of repressions, as well: – Y.V. Bulatov, Y.K. Bulatov, I.V. Bulatov, I.P. Suev, M.S. Karavaev – they were shot in 1937. One year later F.Y. Gorbushin, N.P. Dolmatov, I.D. Pestov, A.A. Samoilov met the same terrible fate.. These people had been farmers; they had been working hard from morning to night in order to feed their families. In the meantime all of them have received their rehabilitation. The State was courageous enough to apologize to them and to their families and revoke the false accusation, according to which they had been “enemies of the people”.
I. Zorin
Anguish and Memory. Dedicated to the victims of political repressions in Yermakovo District in the 1930s to 1950s.