Dear Comrade Sholokhov!

Both your letters have been received, as you know. The assistance that was required has already been provided.

To investigate the matter, Comrade Shkiryatov will arrive in your Veshenskiy District, and I very much ask you to provide him with assistance.

That is so. But that is not all, Comrade Sholokhov. The fact is that your letters produce a somewhat one-sided impression. I want to write you a few words about this.

I thanked you for your letters, since they reveal sore spots in our Party-Soviet work, revealing how sometimes our officials, wishing to rein in the enemy, inadvertently strike at friends and descend into sadism. But this does not mean that I agree with you in everything. You see one side, and you see it rather well. But it is only one side of the matter. In order not to err in politics (your letters are not fiction but solid politics), one must survey, one must be able to see the other side as well. And the other side consists in the fact that the esteemed grain growers of your district (and not only your district) were conducting an "Italian strike" (sabotage!) and were not averse to leaving the workers and the Red Army without bread. The fact that the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without blood) — this fact does not change the reality that the esteemed grain growers were in essence waging a "quiet" war against Soviet power. A war of attrition, dear Comrade Sholokhov...

Of course, this circumstance cannot in any way justify those outrages which, as you assure me, were committed by our officials. And those guilty of these outrages must bear the proper punishment. But it is still clear as day that the esteemed grain growers are not such harmless people as it may have seemed from a distance.

Well, all the best, and I shake your hand.

Yours,

I. Stalin.

May 6, 1933.

Pisatel i vozhd. P. 69.

AP RF. F. 3. Op. 61. D. 549. L. 194.