Hopes were certainly high when Stalin declared a census be taken in 1937 across the entire Soviet Union. As the illustration above shows, gigantic success was anticipated for socialism in the USSR. But as the results started rolling in, Soviet leadership was in for a few surprises. One of the questions asked was whether or not the individuals being polled felt they were religious. Over 55% of the respondents stated that they were, indeed, religious. This was a bit of a setback for the USSR’s firm stance against religion. But the actual population counts themselves would pose the largest challenge.
As the totals shown (pictured below from a table of the results), certain areas not only didn’t meet expected population increases, their numbers actually dropped over the decade since the last tally. This was clearly the result of the Holodmor, the massive man-made famine that stretched across Ukraine, and additionally impacted (as can be seen below) Kazakhstan and southern Russia.
Stalin, easily fit to be tied in the best of times, was positively apoplectic, and those closest to him made it plain to the NKVD that they had better come up with a decent enough fabrication to placate Uncle Joe, because news of the census would be trotting the globe in no time. The NKVD got to work and came up with implausible but good-enough-for-Stalin embroidery of new truths.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) recently declassified a handful of documents relating to one particular census taker, likely one of thousands facing the same fate. As the SBU press release that accompanied the documents pointed out, “Millions of Ukrainians died during the Holodomor of 1932-33. But the Soviet authorities did not acknowledge any hints of the genocide they had created. This is evidenced by the now declassified archives. But the 1937 All-Union census revealed the true demographic crisis. Soviet demographers expected that there should have been 35 million inhabitants in Ukraine at that time. Instead, the census recorded only 29 million, that is, not even at the 1926 level.”
This final report did not please the leaders of the Communist Party, therefore the census officials, including Olimpiy Kvitkin, were accused of “obtaining artificially understated and distorted figures,” and were accused of membership in Right and Trotskyist counter-revolutionary organizations. Clearly, in the eyes of the Soviet legal system, manipulating population numbers to such levels would have to be classified as terrorist and subversive acts. Confessions were forced, execution orders were drawn up, and census takers would never be given the opportunity to tell their families that the State was lying to them.
We’ve translated Kvitkin’s declassified Criminal Indictment and Notification of Execution. You can see for yourself to what depths a cornered government can lower itself before social media was invented.
APPROVED
CHIEF 4 DEPARTMENT OF GUGB
(LULOV)
USSR PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
(VYSHINSKY)
25 September 1937
CRIMINAL INDICTMENT
on investigation case No. 11436 on the indictment of Olimpiy Aristarkhovich KVITKIN in the crime covered by Article 58, p. 7, 8, 10, and 11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
The 4th Department of the GUGB [Main Directorate for State Security] has information that within the TsUNKhU [Central Administration of National Economic Accounting] there is a harmful counter-revolutionary organization, a member of which is Olimpiy Aristarkhovich KVITKIN, head of the All-Union Population Census Bureau of the USSR TsUNKhU.
O.A. KVITKIN was arrested based on this information.
During testimony, it was established that until recently, also within the USSR TsUNKhU, there was a Rightist Trotskyist harmful counter-revolutionary terrorist organization, lead by TsUNKhU chief KRAVAL.
KVITKIN was an active participant in this organization. In one of its harmful activities, the organization chose KVITKIN to head the All-Union Population Census Bureau to acquire artificially lowered and misinterpreted population census numbers, in order for the counter-revolutionary organizations of the Rights and Trotskyites to use in their fight against Soviet authority.
Through the falsification of the numbers, the Rights and the Trotskyites pursued their objective of showing to the entire world how “bankrupt” the party and government policy is regarding socialist development and to “show” that the policy of industrialization and collectivization supposedly led to the extinction of large masses of the population, that the most hardworking and active elements are supposedly fleeing the collective farms for the villages, leading to the failure of the collective farms, and that socialism supposedly “does not improve, but instead deteriorates the welfare of the broad masses of the people”.
The following has been established specifically in regard to KVITKIN:
1. The son of a retired colonel, hostile toward the Soviet authorities throughout the entire existence of the Soviet state, and enjoying counter-revolutionary connections with former Mensheviks, saboteurs, other anti-Soviet individuals, repressed by elements of the NKVD, among his equals, systematically engaged in anti-Soviet agitation and in his routine work in the TsSU-TsUNKhU put into action his counter-revolutionary beliefs.
2. Having accepted KRAVAL’s recommendation on joining the harmful rightist Trotskyist organization, KVITKIN, together with other members of the organization and managers of the employees of the USSR TsUNKhU and Ukrainian SSR UNKhU, during the all-union census, promoted a number of harmful Rightist and Trotskyist stances, specifically:
1) Maliciously entered lower USSR population numbers compared to the actual number previously officially published by the government.
2) For malicious purposes, distorted the numbers of the collective farm workforces to show, supposedly, in a number of oblasts and republics that almost all of the full-bodied workforce from the collective farms had fled, supposedly resulting in a dire situation in the collective farms.
3) To the same end, lowered the cultural and political metrics of the workers and the population numbers of students in the USSR.
3. Upon entering Ukraine with the malicious assignments from KRAVAL, KVITKIN handed off KRAVAL’s instructions to a member of a counter-revolutionary organization of the right in Ukraine – former head of the UNKhU of the UkSSR ASATKIN. The instructions were in regard to lowering and distorting the population numbers.
4. He similarly recruited the head of the census sector WEITZBLIT into performing malicious acts in Ukraine, and provided him with specific directions.
Based on the above, Olimpiy Aristarkhovich KVITKIN, year of birth 1874, native of Borzna, Chernihiv Oblast, Russian citizen of the USSR, non-party member, university-educated, son of a retired colonel, former member of the RSDRP, with no previous convictions, and prior to his arrest the head of the All-Union Population Census Bureau, stands accused of:
a) having been recruited by KRAVAL into a Right-Trotskyist terrorist and sabotage organization, standing on positions of individual terror against Soviet leadership, and on assignment from this organization, was engaged in subversive activity in accounting for the number and social makeup of the population, for the purpose of providing anti-Soviet organizations of the Rights and Trotskyites with falsified population census numbers for their fight against Soviet authority;
b) being in counter-revolutionary relationships with anti-Soviet individuals (who were repressed at various times by NKVD elements), he expressed systematically anti-Soviet views and carried out anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist organization instructions.
The aforementioned are crimes as stipulated by article 58, paragraphs 7, 8, and 11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
The defendant KVITKIN has confessed to these crimes.
In light of the fact that the anti-Soviet organization of the Rights and Trotskyists to which this counter-revolutionary organization was part of the TsUNKhU, stands by the position of individual terror against the leadership of the VKPb [All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks] and Soviet authority, and has been making arrangements for a series of terrorist attacks, this investigative case, based on the law of 1 December 1934, is subject to consideration by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
Prepared on 19 September 1937.
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR OF THE 4th DEPARTMENT OF THE GUGB
SR LIEUTENANT OF STATE SECURITY KONKIN
CONCUR: SECTION HEAD OF THE 4th DEPARTMENT OF THE GUGB
CAPTAIN OF STATE SECURITY GLEBOV
NOTE: The arrestee is being held in Butyrskaya Prison of the NKVD. The witnesses in the case, Lazar Solomonovich BRANDGENDER and Moisey Beniaminovich KURMAN, are also accused of the same crimes, and are being held in the NKVD prison, and ASATKIN, BLEITSBLIT [sic], AND KUSTELEK are being held in Kyiv.
SECRET
NOTIFICATION
The sentence of execution of Olimpiy Aristarkhovich Kvitkin was carried out in the city of Moscow on 28 September 1937. The Certificate of Execution is stored in the 1 Special Department of the USSR NKVD, Volume 2, page 287.
CHIEF OF THE 12th SPECIAL UNIT OF THE 1st DEPARTMENT OF THE USSR NKVD
LIEUTENANT OF STATE SECURITY SHEVELEV
Translation © 2025 by Michael Estes and TranslatingHistory.org
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