Today, I began research on Komsomol participation in collectivization and found this little tidbit in the archive. This is from Komsomol Central Committee member Gerasimov’s report, October 1929:
In Penzen region, there were rumors that a [grain requisitioning] commission arrived to close the church. Or in a similar rumor, the commission arrived to arrest the priest and take him away. A crowd gathered. Or another case, to catch a swindler. A crowd of up to 800 people surrounded the commission and began shouting. They wanted to arrange a samosud. There were shouts of “They attack the peasantry from all sides, let’s beat them all.” True, more than half of [the crowd] was drunk.
RGASPI f. 1M, op.5, d. 24a, l. 22
