and deportations, of houses being burned and people killed, and of peasants fleeing from their villages and slaughtering their cattle to avoid collectivization. ‘On our farms we can all work for ourselves,’ Nikolai Golovin had warned a meeting of the commune in July, ‘but on the kolkhoz we will become serfs again.’2 Many of the older peasants in Obukhovo had been born before the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
In 1917, Nikolai had led the peasant revolution on the land. He organized the confiscation of the Church’s land (there were no gentry estates in the area) and through the commune and the Soviet oversaw the redivision of the village land, allocating strips of arable land to the family farms according to their household size. Nikolai was well regarded by the other villagers, whose smallholding family farms, worked with their own labour on communal land, had increased in number as a result of the Revolution, and they often came to him for agricultural advice. They valued his intelligence and honesty, his industry, sobriety and quiet modesty, and trusted his opinions, because he understood and could explain in simple terms the policies of the Soviet government. The old millstone outside his house was an informal meeting place where villagers would gather in the summer evenings, and Nikolai would give his views on local incidents.3
The Golovins were defenders of peasant tradition. Their family farm was organized on patriarchal lines, where all the children worked under the command of their father and were brought up to obey him as an almost god-like figure of authority (‘God is in the sky and father in the house’). Like all peasants, the Golovins believed in the rights of family labour on the land. This had been the guiding principle of the agrarian revolution of 1917–18. In the Civil War, when Nikolai had helped to organize the Red Army in the north, he had given his support to the Soviet regime on the understanding that it would defend these peasant rights (throughout the 1920s he kept a portrait of Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet Commissar of Military Affairs, next to the icons in the main room of his house). But these rights were increasingly attacked by the Bolsheviks, whose militant young Komsomol activists led the campaign for collectivization in Obukhovo. The Komsomol held meetings in the village school, where violent speeches were made by agitators against the richest peasants in Obukhovo – most of all against the Golovins. The villagers had never heard such propaganda in the past and many were impressed by the long words used by the leaders of the Komsomol. At these meetings the villagers were told that they belonged to three mutually hostile classes: the poor peasants, who were the allies of the proletariat, the middle peasants, who were neutral, and the rich or ‘kulak’ peasants, who were its enemies.* The names of all the peasants in these different classes were listed on a board outside the village school. These divisions were entirely generated by the Komsomol. The villagers had no previous conception of themselves in terms of social class. They had always thought of themselves as one ‘peasant family’, and the poorest peasants were normally respectful, and even deferential, to the most successful peasants like the Golovins. But at the meetings in the village school, when their tongues were loosened by alcohol, the poor would add their voice to the denunciations of the ‘kulak Golovins’.4
Yevdokiia and Nikolai with their son Aleksei Golovin (1940s)
The Komsomol in Obukhovo consisted of a dozen teenagers who went around the village in semi-military uniforms and carried guns. They were intimidating to the villagers. Their leader was Kolia Kuzmin, the eighteen-year-old son of a poor and alcoholic peasant whose squalid house with its broken roof was located at the far end of the village, where the poorest families in Obukhovo lived. As a boy, Kolia had been sent out by his family to beg from the other farms. He would often come to the Golovin household with a ‘neighbourly request for matches, salt, kerosene or flour, which in the Kuzmin household never lasted until the New Year,’ recalls Antonina, the daughter of Nikolai. Her father took pity on the teenager, giving him a job in his leather workshop in the courtyard of his farm; Kolia worked there for several years, until 1927, when he joined the Komsomol and turned against the Golovins.5
In many villages, especially remote ones like Obukhovo, the Bolsheviks depended on the Komsomol to do their agitation in the absence of a Party cell. For every rural Party member there were four rural Komsomol members in the mid-1920s. The nearest Party office to Obukhovo was seven kilometres away in the district town of Ustiuzhna. Since the village Soviet in Obukhovo was dominated by the Golovins, the restless young men of the village who joined the Komsomol were placed in charge of leading the campaign for the kolkhoz. From the autumn of 1928, when the Party leadership began to call for mass collectivization, Kuzmin and his comrades went around the village, inciting the poorest peasants to join them in a battle against the ‘counterrevolutionary’ influence of the ‘kulaks’ and the Church, and sending unsigned letters of denunciation to the district town. In the spring of 1929, Nikolai was expelled from the Obukhovo Soviet and deprived of his civil rights as ‘the capitalist owner of a leather- working enterprise’. Then, in November, his house was searched by the village Komsomol, together with officials from the district town, who imposed a heavy tax of 800 roubles on his ‘kulak’ farm. This tax, part of a nationwide policy to ‘squeeze out’ the ‘kulaks’ and confiscate their property, resulted in the ruination of almost 4,000 peasant households in Vologda alone.6
To pay the tax Nikolai was forced to sell two milking cows, his shoe-making machinery, an iron bed and a trunk of clothes. With two of his four brothers, he even worked that winter on a building site in Leningrad to earn some extra cash. The three brothers were thinking of leaving Obukhovo, where the collectivization of agriculture now seemed unavoidable, and they wanted to find out what life was like in the city. They slept on benches in a dormitory, ate their meals in cafeterias and saved up enough to send several hundred roubles home, but after a few months of living in this way, they decided to return to their village. ‘It is no life for a human being,’ Nikolai explained in a letter to his family, ‘if one has to purchase everything, bread, potatoes and cabbage, from a shop.’7
Nikolai’s return, in the spring of 1930, brought his relations with the Komsomol to a breaking point. One evening, he was having supper at his house with his brother Ivan Golovin, a peasant from the neighbouring village. They were sitting at the kitchen table by the window, and their silhouettes, illuminated by a kerosene lamp, were clearly visible to Kuzmin and his followers, who gathered outside in the dark. The young men were clearly drunk. They shouted at the ‘kulaks’ to ‘come out’, and then shot at the window. Ivan was hit in the head. He lay dead in a pool of blood.
A few weeks later, Kuzmin came again to Nikolai’s house, this time with two Party officials from the district town. There was a gathering at Nikolai’s house that night, and the main room was full of friends and relatives. Kuzmin accused them of holding an illegal assembly. ‘Kulaks, open up, stop conspiring against Soviet power!’ he shouted, banging on the door. He had a gun and shot into the air. Confronting the intruders on the porch, Nikolai refused to let them in. Kuzmin threatened to murder Nikolai (‘I shall shoot you, just as I murdered your brother, and no one will punish me,’ he was heard to say), whereupon a brawl ensued, and Nikolai pushed Kuzmin to the ground. Kuzmin and his comrades went away. A few days later he wrote to the chief of the Ustiuzhna political police (OGPU) denouncing Nikolai as a
kulak exploiter who is spreading anti-Soviet propaganda in our village together with a dozen other kulak elements. They are saying that the Soviet government is robbing the people. Their aim is to sabotage collectivization by turning the people against it.
Kuzmin must have known that this would be enough to get his former patron arrested, especially since his denunciation was supported by the two Bolsheviks, who added for good measure that Nikolai was ‘always drunk’ when he ‘cursed the Soviets’.8
Sure enough, on 2 August, as their guests were readying to leave the Golovins at the end of the Ilin holiday, two officials came to arrest Nikolai. Imprisoned in Ustiuzhna, Nikolai was convicted by a three-man OGPU tribunal of ‘terrorist intent’ (for striking Kuzmin to the ground) and sentenced to three years at the Solovetsky prison complex located on an island in the White Sea. The last time Antonina saw her father was through the bars of the Ustiuzhna jail. She had walked to the district centre with her mother, her brothers and sisters to catch a glimpse of Nikolai before he was dispatched to the Solovetsky camp. For the next three years the image of her father behind bars haunted Antonina’s dreams.9
A few weeks after Nikolai’s arrest, the peasants of Obukhovo were herded to a village meeting, at which they passed a resolution to close down their family farms and, handing over all their land, their tools and livestock, to establish a kolkhoz.
Collectivization was the great turning-point in Soviet history. It destroyed a way of life that had developed
