The kolkhozes of Lesha Raion in Northern Oblast this year are getting a very abundant harvest, that even our grandfathers do not remember such an abundance of produce, but the enemies of the people, seeing that the kolkhozes are growing stronger, the kolkhoz farmers are becoming well off and are becoming even more devoted to the party and its leader Comrade Stalin, at the same time are trying to muck things up, prevent the harvest from being gathered and stir up the masses on the kolkhoz. Take [for example] at our machine-tractor stations the enemies of the people Trotskyists Bukharinists have put machines out of commission, machines as decisive in the harvest as the seventeen VNIL-5 flax pullers. Flax has been harvested from only thirty-five hectares for the season. Combines are not being used, they are standing in the fields and the manager is doing nothing. MTS contracts with kolkhozes are not being honored and MTS leaders have yet to give a single accounting to kolkhoz farmers, fearful that their wrecking work will be exposed to the masses. The statutes of the agricultural artel are being violated on the kolkhozes and nobody wants to do anything about it, take for example on our Baklanka Kolkhoz the kolkhoz farmers did not elect the kolkhoz chairman Mikhailov, but who has already been working since 15 January of this year and has systematically violated Stalin's statutes and in revenge against Stalinist shock worker and Komsomol member Il'ia Ukhanov. [The nature of the alleged revenge is unspecified, as is the ostensible motive for it.] And the raion organizations, instead of protecting Ukhanov, are conniving over Ukhanov, conducting an investigation and playing up his mistakes. They harass rural correspondents like rural correspondent Krasulin was ousted from his job as a bookkeeper for the village cooperative store because he often criticized the leadership and others.

I Alekseev have been a rural correspondent since 1926. On 10 July 1936 I cut up my foot in a mower, but I could not get any help in treating it anywhere, instead of help I got gibes like from the same Baklanka village cooperative store it was a member of the auditing commission. I was taken off supposedly due to illness, but this is wrong, because to replace me they brought in An. Iv. Serov who just arrived from a concentration camp and who is now doing all he can to ruin the village cooperative store, and director Koshel'nikov of the Sidorovskaia MTS branded me a Trotskyist at the MTS council for a letter [I wrote] to the USSR People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and the raion land-management department's horse expert says that Alekseev should be dragged by his feet into the river for that letter. But in spite of all this the masses of kolkhoz farmers themselves are struggling with all their might to preserve the abundant crop and the harvest is going through to completion. Then the enemies of the people took another method of struggle to irritate the masses. They are setting fire to villages, the biggest and the most packed [densely settled], so that they burn more, like the village of Otemetenikovo recently burned down, a fire was set in a nonresidential structure, today 19 September 1937 the village of Ramenovo burned down, the fire was set in a nonresidential structure, it burned down in the village of Antipino, the same thing on the same night a threshing barn with grain on a kolkhoz was set afire. And what is no secret is that there used to be SR [Socialist Revolutionary] groups in these villages, and apparently their offspring are the ones that are operating. [The fires most likely became more frequent because of the dry weather that prevailed in 1937.] But our raion leadership hasn't come down much to the localities yet, so far it has only handled the problem in the raion itself, but after all Comrade Uritsky correctly noted in his article, to eliminate the consequences of wrecking in agriculture and what must be done, or there is no other way.

I ask that the editors handle my letter themselves personally, because if you sent my letters on for investigation, I never received anything after that, it's like they're mocking me and not to disclose my name right up until the facts are checked. Because I already reported what happened to me over this and do not contact me directly while the facts are checked.

And a great many other violations of revolutionary law can be cited.