Searches in Peasant Yards During Grain Procurement
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kyrgyz ASSR Yu. Abdrakhmanov, carrying out the corresponding directive from the Central Asian Bureau, went on a long business trip to the cotton-growing regions of the Osh district. In the Bazar-Kurgan district, he met with I. Zelensky at a meeting held here regarding the issue of "cotton extraction." It was here that measures were developed that differed from previous ones in that they more clearly formulated methods of administrative pressure on the peasants. They included a more thorough household inspection, i.e., searches of all cotton planters; the issuance of additional tasks to farms that had already fulfilled their contractual obligations; comprehensive searches by the GPU of prosperous farms; lawsuits against collective farms that had not fulfilled their cotton delivery plan, with joint liability for all members of the collective farm; lawsuits against production cooperatives to hold the management accountable; and declaring cotton left in the fields after January 1 as ownerless, etc.
Unfortunately, this decision, like many similar ones, is covered by a dark veil of anonymity, so convenient for evading individual responsibility through the form of "collective decision" — the infamous "majority" decided the fates of people they had never seen. As we are reminded today, this form has proven to be very resilient... But in this case, thanks to the open protocol, we can learn about Yu. Abdrakhmanov's particular viewpoint on this issue in particular and on the path of collectivization in general.
The conduct of searches in peasant yards during grain procurement, the holding of collective farm management and party cells accountable, arrests, and arbitrariness provoked a sharp protest from Yu. Abdrakhmanov. While not excluding the kulak-bourgeois-manap resistance to procurement and the need for coercive measures, he believed that the difficulties were not so much created by internal enemies as by the mistakes of party and state bodies in economic management, violating the administrative and coercive methods of the economic mechanism that had developed during Lenin's New Economic Policy, which led to the artificial creation of famine in the country.
Negative Consequences of "Stalinist" Collectivization in Kyrgyzstan