A Tale of Two Men: Bergavinov, Tolmachev and the Bergavinov Commission

Abstract

ON 10 MAY 1930 THE POLITBURO APPROVED A REPORT submitted to it by a Central Committee Commission chaired by S.A. Bergavinov, the first secretary of the North krai (regional) party committee. The commission's mandate had been to review cases of 'incorrectly exiled' peasant families in the North krai (region) in the first third of 1930. The Politburo noted that only 6% of all applicants seeking redress had been incorrectly exiled, while 8% were classified as 'questionable' (somnitel'no). Of the 6%, only civil war veterans, Red Partisans and the families of Red Army soldiers would be allowed to return home to their villages; the rest were to be settled as 'free citizens' in the North. The Politburo protocols also included a counterproposal submitted by two dissenting members-V.N. Tolmachev, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Russian Republic, and I.G. Eremin of the People's Commissariat of Justice-which was brusquely dismissed.' The Politburo protocols that ratified the Central Committee Commission's report contain the shadow of a hint that not all was well in the work of the commission more commonly known as the Bergavinov Commission. The report was marred by a suggestion of dissent. What had happened in the commission and why did Tolmachev, seconded by Eremin, differ with Bergavinov? Did Tolmachev, condemned at the January 1933 Central Committee Plenum with N.B. Eismont and A.P. Smimov as members of an 'antiparty grouping', represent, as Bergavinov would put it, not only 'a liberal approach, but something more ...'2 to the policies of the Communist Party? The story of the Bergavinov Commission is a tale of two men, enmeshed in bureaucratic politics and holding in their hands the fate of thousands of peasant families condemned to lives of misery as 'special settlers' (spetspereselentsy, a euphemism for peasants deported as kulaks during the first five-year plan) in the desolate hinterlands of the North.