No Expulsion from Collective Farms
Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee, No Expulsion from Collective Farms. April 19, 1938
This short directive addressed one of the sharpest weapons in kolkhoz discipline: expulsion. Issued in the wake of the 1935–36 effort to regularize collective-farm rules, it warned local officials against driving peasants out of the kolkhoz as an easy punishment, a practice that could strip a family of work, rations, and access to land. The document shows how “order” in the countryside depended not only on coercion from above, but also on constant attempts to restrain the arbitrariness of kolkhoz managers and district authorities.
Original Source: Izvestiia, 20 April 1938; Sistematicheskoe sobranie deistvuiushchikh zakonov Soiuza sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik (Moscow, 1938), text 115.
The CPC of the USSR and the CC of the A. -U. C. P. (B.) have more than once warned the local Party and Soviet organizations of the harm arising out of the mass expulsion of members from the kolkhozes. The CPC of the USSR and CC of the A. - U. C. P. (B. ) have more than once pointed out the anti-Party and anti-State nature of such a practice. Notwithstanding this, cases of the unjustified expulsion of members from the kolkhozes have occurred in many districts...
The CPC of the USSR and the CC of the A. -U. C. P. (B. ) consider that this practice is due to the formal and soulless bureaucratic attitude of many leading kolkhoz workers and also Party and Soviet regional leaders toward the fate of human beings, the fate of individual kolkhoz members... They do not realize that expulsion from a kolkhoz artificially breeds discontent and resentment among the expelled members and engenders an uncertainty regarding their position in the kolkhoz among members generally, which state of affairs cannot but play into the hands of the enemies of the people.
The CPC of the USSR and the CC of the VSKP (B.) resolve:
To prohibit purges of the kolkhozes on any grounds whatsoever.
To prohibit the expulsion from the kolkhozes of members of the families of kolkhoz members because one member of the family has left the kolkhoz for temporary or permanent employment in a State concern.
To prohibit expulsion from the kolkhozes for infringements of internal regulations.
To provide that henceforth expulsions of members from the kolkhozes be adopted as an extreme measure towards obviously incorrigible members who undermine and disorganize the kolkhoz, and this only after all preventive and educational measures provided by the Statute of Agricultural Artels have been exhausted, and in strict conformity with the procedure of expulsion as laid down by this Statute, i.e., upon the decision of a general meeting of the members of the artel at which no less than two-thirds of their total are present.
Nevertheless, even in such cases, every consideration must be given to the appeals of the members expelled.
To provide that the decision of a general meeting of members of the kolkhoz concerning the expulsion of a member does not enter into force, and that the said member retains all his rights of membership, until the final examination of the said decision by the local district executive committee.
To warn the chairmen and members of the kolkhoz administrative boards, and also the district Party and Soviet workers, that those guilty of an infringement of the present decree will be liable to prosecution on criminal charges.
President of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR
V. Molotov
Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist (Bolshevik) Party
I. Stalin
Source: "Soviet Legislation," The Slavonic (and East European) Review, Vol. XVII, No. 49 (July, 1938), pp. 219-221.