Why the Comzet Leaders Were Dismissed: Serious Charges by Investigating Committee Against Directors

The reason for the recent change in the composition of the Comzet, involving the dismissal of the old leaders of the Jewish settlement movement is explained in the report of the investigating committee into the work of the Comzet, which is published to-day, and on the basis of which the charges were made.

The men in charge of the work are accused in the report of having conducted it without any plan or system. No one was responsible for anything, it says. Things were done without any sort of control, with the result that the plans laid down were not carried into effect. According to the plan given to the Comzet, there should have been about 12,000 transmigrant families in the Crimea by January 1st. Actually only 9,000 families migrated, and more than 5,000 of them went back to their old homes, mwaning that the plan was only 33 per cent. effective.

In Bureya there should have been 14,000 Jewish transmigrants by January 1st. Actually only 7,730 souls migrated, and only about 5,000 have remained there, meaning that the plan has been only 43 per cent. effective. According to other reports, the number of settlers who have left Bureya and gone back to their homes is much larger.

The Comzet had thus failed in two directions, the report says. It had not carried out the plan of recruiting the quota of migrant settlers, and it had allowed a big stream of re-emigration to set in. The Comzet failed to take any steps to discover the reasons for this re-emigration or to put a stop to it, the damage done by this failure is not only that the area of land sown in the Crimea and in Bureya was less than had been fixed upon, but the fact that the greater half of the settlers left the places of settlement and went back to their old homes meant that thousands of hundredweights of wheat, hundreds of hectares of other corn, and hundreds of hectares of cotton were left to rot on the fields, because there were no workers to gather it. Many Jewish collective farms were compelled for that reason to hire labour, meaning a big expenditure, with the result that the collective farms were rendered destitute.

The fact that the plan in regard to the work in Bureya was not carried into effect meant that there was no possibility of providing the required quantity of timber, of building roads, of conducting the amelioration work, all of which went to do a great deal of damage both to the transmigration movement and to the interests of the State as a whole.

The investigation commission accuses the old leaders of the Comzet of having had no knowledge of what was happening in the places of settlement, of having left the transmigrants unprovided with food, housing and other essentials, the result being that a great many of them ran away, and the entire work fell into chaos.

Even after Stalin issued his famous six directives for carrying on the work on a new big scale, the Comzet, the report declares, still continued to work on the old lines. It had not only failed to prepare a real operative plan for the transmigration in 1932, but it had not even adopted any definite decision with regard to the number of transmigrants to be recruited this year for the Crimea and for Bureya. Nor had it fixed the amount of money that should be allocated for the work during the year, or how many immigrants should be recruited in each of the Soviet Republic.

In that way, the Comzet imperilled the entire transmigration work for the year, the report says.

DISCUSSION IN COMZET OVER RESPECTIVE MERITS OF CRIMEA AND BUREYA: EACH SIDE WOULD HAVE DESTROYED THE WORK OF THE OTHER

There was a terrible amount of dissension in the Comzet, the report complains, between the adherents of settlement in Bureya and the adherents of settlement in the Crimea. Mereszin personally is accused of having failed to put a stop to these internal dissensions.

The feeling in the Comzet has been such, the report declares, that those who worked in the Crimea would have liked for reasons of competition to kill the entire work in Bureya, and the workers in Bureya would for the same reason have liked to do the same with the work in the Crimea. This constant friction in the Comzet completely broke up the machinery of the organization and made it incompetent to do the work with which it was entrusted.

The Commission comes to the conclusion that the machinery of the Comzet must be radically changed, and that workers must be brought into it who will introduce the militant methods of the five-year plan work in the works and factories to push on the activity and carry out the plans laid down to the full 100 per cent.