How the Mice Buried the Cat : Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces

The Aleshki trial was one of dozens held in raion centers in the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1937. The typical defendant was a poorly educated man of peasant origin, probably in his thirties or forties, who was a member of the Communist Party. Departure for wage-work was a traditional cause of struggle between the Russian village commune and individual peasants. The most striking common characteristic of the "criminal" behaviors attributed to the defendants was that they were harmful to peasants, especially kolkhozniki, and offended the peasants' sense of fairness and propriety. Complaints by peasants about their expulsion or forced departure from the kolkhoz were among the most frequent of all peasant grievances, judging both by the 1937 raion trials and the letters received at the same period by Krest'ianskaia gazeta. A number of raion trials featured charges from kolkhozniki about inept agricultural instructions from raion authorities that had caused hardship to peasants and damaged agricultural productivity.

© Peter Waldron 2007

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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