85 years ago, on March 3, 1927, it was decided to bring to trial the leaders of the construction of the century - a land irrigation system in Central Asia - who were suspected of enormous embezzlement. Vlast columnist Evgeny Zhirnov understood the timeless history of the development of budget funds.

Kaufman Canal

It so happened that in the second half of the 19th century, the problem of providing the domestic textile industry with domestic raw materials gradually turned from a purely economic one into a serious political problem. There were a great many reasons for this. First of all, the government of the empire tried to get rid of the dependence on raw material exports that had been depressing the state for centuries. After all, for many years, the entire life of the country directly and directly depended on European grain prices - almost the same as now on oil prices. Europe had its own decent harvest, or the overseas colonies of the great powers suddenly increased food supplies to the metropolis, and then the Russian Empire began to experience difficulties in selling its main export goods and, accordingly, with the import of everything that was not produced within the country.

For a long time, Russian cotton fabrics remained one of the few goods, as they said then, of Russian manufacture that were exported outside the country. True, as angry experts on the issue argued, due to low quality and relatively high prices, they could not compete with the products of English manufactories. However, they were eagerly accepted in exchange for goods by Russia's southern and eastern neighbors. In particular, in the main center of Russian-Chinese trade, Kyakhta, calico fabrics were exchanged for tea, which was expensive within the Russian Empire. Such transactions brought decent profits. In addition, according to Russian customs statistics, a lot of cotton fabrics were exported to Persia and the Central Asian khanates.

The problem was that the country’s own cotton appeared only after the annexation of Transcaucasia and the first conquests of lands in Turkestan. Moreover, neither its quantity, nor, especially, its quality could satisfy Russian textile manufactories. Central Asian cotton was considered too coarse compared to Egyptian or American cotton.

The task of increasing domestic cotton production was complicated by the fact that it could be radically solved only by expanding agricultural land on the newly acquired southern outskirts of the empire. But only irrigation could turn the arid steppes into cotton fields, and this meant building new canals, which was very, very expensive.

That is why the most important activities of the conqueror of Turkestan and his first governor-general, Konstantin Petrovich Kaufman, included the reclamation of subordinate lands. In 1869, the first survey work began on the vast territory of the Golodnaya Steppe, and then a project was prepared that provided for the irrigation of 44 thousand hectares.

It was then that, under the influence of the general situation in the country and local conditions, a well-known practice of carrying out this type of work developed. At first it turned out that the research was carried out with errors, and the project had to be redone. And then it became clear that the capital’s officials, despite the importance of the project, were in no hurry to release government funds. And not only because of traditional bureaucratic delays and competition between various provinces and departments: the treasury simply did not have enough funds for more important and pressing needs.

Therefore, in 1873, Kaufman decided to use administrative pressure in a military manner to implement his plan - to force local peasants to work on construction for free, as service in kind. Tens of thousands of farmers from different regions of the province began to be driven to the construction site. But they worked, to put it mildly, unsatisfactorily. Things went a little better the next year, 1874, when government funds, albeit in small quantities, were nevertheless allocated and workers began to be paid at least “feed” - five kopecks per person per day.

As a result, gathering up to 70 thousand farmers at the construction site, by 1878 Kaufman managed to build the first stage of the canal. However, the following year he died, work was suspended, and in 1881 it was completely stopped.

A sharp increase in the tax on cotton imports led to a rapid increase in its production within the Russian Empire
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

"Sacrifice on the altar of domestic industry"

The decision to stop construction of the canal was explained by both the eternal shortage of funds and the choice of new tactics to support Russian cotton producers. In 1879, the government introduced fairly high customs duties on imported cotton - 40 kopecks. per pood. And then they began to increase. In 1892, the duty was increased to 1 ruble. 35 kopecks, and in 1901 - up to 4 rubles. 15 kopecks

The idea was that Russian owners of weaving factories themselves would begin to invest money in the development of arid lands and engage in land reclamation. However, everyone who wanted to take on such projects wanted to have a guarantee of making a profit, and therefore insisted on leasing the developed lands for at least 50 years. But this approach did not satisfy the government, and therefore tens of thousands of proposals for the private development of Central Asian lands traveled from department to department for years until they finally ended up in the archives. Naturally, any restrictions ceased to apply when members of the imperial family and the emperor himself decided to take part in a profitable business.

However, despite the restriction of private initiative, the production of American cotton varieties in Turkestan has increased significantly. The constantly increasing price made it very attractive for cultivation on already developed lands. True, to the detriment of the cultivation of traditional crops from wheat to melons. The consequence of this was a sharp rise in food prices in Central Asia. From 1890 to 1901, a pound of wheat rose in price from 45 kopecks. up to 1 rub. 35 kopecks Ultimately, this also affected the price of domestic cotton and products made from it. Ethnographer and statistician Orest Avenirovich Shkapsky wrote in 1909:

“How great the overpayments of the population of all Russia for cotton products can be judged by the calculation made in the early 90s, when it was calculated that in Russia a pound of cotton products is 9 rubles more expensive than English fabrics, provided that the latter are freely circulated on our market ... In 1898, this overpayment was already 12.9 rubles. And since in 1898 12,674 thousand poods of products entered the domestic market, the total amount of overpayments is expressed in 165 million rubles. customs duties received 22,308 million rubles, and the remaining 143 million represent the sacrifice of the Russian people on the altar of domestic industry for the right to wear calico of Russian origin."

The rise in prices, however, also had its positive side. The government of the empire, having fully assessed the matter, decided to finance the project proposed by the provincial authorities of Turkestan for the construction of a canal to the Hungry Steppe for the development of 49 thousand hectares of land. A law specially adopted for this occasion on February 7, 1900 ordered that the work be completed in five years. However, the implementation of the project was painfully reminiscent of the construction of the canal by Governor General Kaufman. The prominent Russian geographer and climatologist Professor Alexander Ivanovich Voeikov wrote:

The replacement of traditional crops with cotton caused serious changes in the existing way of economic life in Turkestan
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

“During the implementation of this case, it turned out that the draft drawn up was insufficiently developed. This circumstance, which was discovered as the work progressed, had an extremely unfavorable impact on the implementation of the begun enterprise and led to the need for a gradual radical reworking of the entire project.”

When reworking the project, it turned out that the funds allocated for its implementation were completely insufficient. And even those were issued by the treasury in extremely reduced quantities. Prince Vladislav Ivanovich Masalsky, who advocated for irrigation in Central Asia, stated:

“In 1899, the cost of the project was estimated at 2.5 million rubles, and, however, the State Council allowed only 2.25 million rubles to be released, i.e. 250 thousand rubles less than the calculated amounts... Due to the difficult situation of the state treasury, the amounts required for the work were significantly reduced starting from the second year... From 1900 to 1906 inclusive, instead of the entire necessary amount, only 1,365,700 rubles were allocated, which, of course , could not but have a most unfavorable effect on the progress of the work.”

Continuing construction required new costs.

“During the re-drafting of the project,” wrote Professor Voeikov, “all the necessary studies were carried out, and the Main Directorate of Land Management and Agriculture calculated the amount of the necessary allocation for the completion of this matter in the amount of 4.856 thousand rubles. After consideration of the project by legislative institutions, it was approved on July 1, 1911 with 4,738,500 rubles were allocated for this need. Thanks to the allocation of the necessary funds, the work was organized so that in November 1913 the Romanov Canal was opened and the beginning of the first large Russian irrigation enterprise in Turkestan was laid. Its significance is very great, since it makes it possible to create. in the center of the region there is a large region with an economically stable Russian agricultural population, to introduce tens of thousands of acres of empty steppes to culture and to develop the cultivation of cotton, which is so necessary for our industry, on newly irrigated lands.”

Actually, the colonization of new irrigated lands by the Russians was no less important a goal than the cultivation of cotton itself. However, a revolution soon occurred, and the new government acquired new interests.

Samara security officers decided that under the guise of well-equipped and regularly fed Soviet irrigators, anti-Soviet elements were hiding
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

"This is a rebellion against the authorities"

The idea of reclamation and development of the lands of Central Asia also found a response among members of the new, Bolshevik leadership. However, a completely different political goal was now being pursued. Lenin, fired up with a grandiose plan to build canals and transform deserts into a blooming garden, thought first of all about gaining popularity among the population of the southern outskirts of the country. In the spring of 1918, he agreed to the creation of the Office of Irrigation Works in Turkestan (Irtur). And on May 17, 1918, he signed a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR "On the allocation of 50 million rubles for irrigation work in Turkestan and on the organization of these works."

This amount was considered significant at that time, but not enormous. However, it could well be enough for the train with Irtur employees to reach Tashkent and be able to begin at least the preliminary deployment of work. However, the undertaking repeated the fate of all previous reclamation projects in Central Asia.

The head of Irtur, a prominent land reclamation specialist Georgy Konstantinovich Riesenkampf, recruited into the management the same “old-regime” specialists and engineers as himself. Many of them were not only nobles, but also had titles. And a considerable part of the Irtur residents retained the bearing of officers of the tsarist army. Most of the employees went to their new permanent duty station with their families and belongings. The preparations and preparations took a long time. In addition, the control echelon moved from Moscow to Tashkent with delays and long stops in accordance with the situation on the fronts of the Civil War. So by December 1918, the Irturites were only able to reach Samara. And here a suspicious team of nobles and former officers was arrested by employees of the local Cheka, who decided that they were facing an organized group of enemies of the new government who, with their wives and children, were trying to escape from the Soviet Republic. In addition, they bring a lot of money with them.

Even mandates with the signatures of Lenin and other leaders of the Council of People's Commissars could not convince the security officers. Lenin’s telegrams demanding the release of everyone against whom there was no clear evidence of counter-revolutionary activity did not help either. Riesenkampf wrote in a statement:

“I demanded to be given a constitution and regulations on emergency commissions, but did not achieve this within five days, and during the same time no charges were brought against me. Now they are trying to prove that we are not a Soviet organization, and the Cheka decided to defeat us And she brought about such a plague, such a disease that it is difficult for my organization to withstand. It turns out that the Cheka can destroy the entire commissariat without any order from the center, contrary to the central government.”

The matter moved forward only after two representatives of the Cheka arrived in Samara. Some of the Irturovites were released from prison a few days later; those suspected of counter-revolutionism were sent to Moscow, which saved them from imminent execution in Samara. On February 25, 1919, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to liquidate the Irtur Case, since no evidence of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy was found. But the specialists never reached Turkestan. And the money, which was intended for exploration work and was confiscated by security officers in Samara, disappeared without a trace. To all inquiries, the security officers invariably answered that the seized amounts did not appear in their registration books.

Taking advantage of the illiteracy of the workers, the heads of water management enterprises paid them meager money.
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

"25% of all amounts were stolen"

Irtur employees arrived in Tashkent only the following year, 1920. Now the organization was called the Turkestan Water Management Department (Turkvodhoz). However, at first, instead of building canals and dams, his employees had to mainly maintain and repair the entire system created before.

A new stage of reclamation began in 1923, when the USSR government allocated multimillion-dollar sums for the design and start of work both to the Turkvodkhoz, which was renamed due to the division of Turkestan into separate republics into the Central Asian Vodkhoz, and to the republican waterkhozes. Vodkhozes annually drew up grandiose work plans and extracted funding, but, to the surprise of the Moscow leadership, there was neither an increase in acreage nor a significant increase in cotton production. At the beginning of 1927, a commission of the People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (NK RKI) went to Sredazvodkhoz, Turkmenvodkhoz and Uzbekvodkhoz.

What she discovered was truly amazing. Tens of millions of rubles were allocated for the work, which were wasted, spent on incomprehensible and unconfirmed work, and the additions exceeded all imaginable and inconceivable amounts.

On March 3, 1927, the report on the situation in water management enterprises was reviewed by the board of the NK RKI and decided to refer the case to court. The Supreme Court of the USSR, however, doubted that abuses of such a scale were even possible, because everything happened in front of the party and Soviet authorities, the police and the OGPU. They did not initiate a criminal case, but a new commission was sent to the water management authorities.

“The Supreme Court of the USSR,” wrote Pravda, “formed a special commission consisting of Comrades Galperin, Kondurushkin and Stefalyuk, which carried out a survey of Central Asian, Uzbek, Turkmen and other water resources. As a result of this work, the investigative commission drew up a conclusion, depicting the outrageous mismanagement, the waste of enormous public funds, which was carried out by the responsible workers of the local water sector. These workers, among 23 people, were brought to criminal liability."

The country's main newspaper also reported preliminary data on the extent of embezzlement and theft:

Checks have not helped to find out how much was spent on the construction of hydraulic structures and when this construction will be completed
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

“The amount of funds that were allocated to water management can be judged from the statements of the Central Asian water management: during the operational years from 1923 to 1926 it spent 26,080,494 rubles. 40 kopecks, of which 8,209,587 rubles 67 kopecks were spent on construction ., and for research - 3,240,745 rubles 85 k. The managers of the Central Asian water management could not say exactly what was built with this money, how it was built, or how much all the buildings actually cost, based on the final technical reports on individual works available in the production department. , it was possible to install the constructed structures only in the amount of 1,748,494 rubles."

The pattern of abuse, as the investigation showed, turned out to be primitively simple. All water management agencies squeezed maximum funds out of the Union budget, jointly coming up with justifications that were even the most incredible. And then they began to spend money at incredible speed for inexplicable purposes.

As prosecutor Ivan Kondurushkin argued at a visiting session of the USSR Supreme Court in Tashkent, one of the main ways of wasting money in water management enterprises was survey work. It was not possible to establish where they were carried out in reality, how much money was spent, whether they were paid to real people or put into pockets:

"The research was staged in such a way that they grew like a snow block rolling from the mountains, starting from a small one, unfolded to infinity. Unlimited and Brigramism accompanied all the largest research ... In science, research is being made to study a particular problem that can be implemented Further, in 50-100 years, in particular in irrigation construction, which is the case of this day, can we allow irrigation surveys, with the cost of them of millionths, which will obviously find practical implementation after 50-100 years? How did the examination be? The witness of the Blagov said that when he arrived in Chardjuy, "there was a thief on the thief, the thief was driven by the thief, dragged literally every penny that could be stolen. Experience is a pit in which any capital can be put. "" I affirm, "said Blagov,“ that 25% of all the amounts allocated for research is stolen ”... to the question:“ And what, such a situation with research only in Turkmenistan? "-Blagov replied:" No, and in other vodkhozs, too, and in the Uzbekwater there is even more ", that is, there is a universal theft in surveys, since it is impossible to check the refereeing technique working in the field, where with expenses and survey materials You can do anything. "

"Women in the vodkhoz were accepted by appearance"

A separate article of the prosecution was the attitude to workers who were counted and robbed everywhere everywhere:

"In different indications, the same disgrace is indicated: workers are literally bullying; medical care is not turned out to be: workers are lying on patients for four days; they live like cave residents: they are forced to dig stoves and stove cakes in them, there are not enough water tanks. The dugouts are two or a kilometers from the place of work, and the workers who have worked all day, of course, is unthinkable. Instead, the representatives of the artel were paid, since the Turkmens about the alignment, the measurement was received repeatedly and considered in the articles of the work executive A person works 12-16 hours a day and receives only 30-50 kopecks for this, he really “seems to him” that he warms up his hands on his hump.

"Pravda" was indignant for the same occasion:

The party considered that the construction in the name and for the good of a person should be carried out by his own hands
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

"The system of counting workers, the lack of sales of money, etc. was practiced. The case in the Soviet Union is completely exceptional and unprecedented."

Huge money, as the prosecutor told in court, spent on a variety of technical innovations. For example, on windmills that were supposed to pump water from the channels:

"In Turkmenistan, they wanted to put the notorious windmills, although the winds are insufficient there, just in the growing season, during the period of watering. It is spent, however, only 10 thousand rubles, but this is a very characteristic case. Some father and son Pogorzhelsky appear on stage. For some reason, they take a forest dacha with a model of Vetrikov and hire the workers. It was quite dry.

And in the supply case, real miracles were happening:

"The Witness Dunaev was characterized by one word" bacchanalia. "The supply department did not know what he was asking for money for, and the vodkhoz did not know what he was letting go of the money. It looked like some kind of personality personnel. As a result, the blanks seemed to be the notorious nowherey good Rotten boots that fell apart in two weeks ... "cheaply" bought a forest in Moscow, which turned out to be a continuous cork; they also turned out to be worthless, did not climb onto the axis, had to be pulled out in the Urals, a representative office in the Urals and the department. Supply for the media, during the harvesting of the Uzbekwater, the initial assumptions were 1 million rubles, however, they prepared, however, 2 million, and then the sale of excessive material began due to the coagulation of work. "

However, the largest consumption item was the content of vodkhoz's apparatus: out of 70 million rubles, allocated to all vodkhozs together, 22 million spent on the apparatus and its leaders. How exactly spent the money on the apparatus the head of the environment of the Khubunov Environment, in the trial was told in detail:

"The witness Dunaev told us about such actions: there were drinking, there were women from the apparatus with whom Rykunov had" shortness ". The booze in Moscow took place with state money. Further, Manzhara says:" Women in the water was accepted by appearance. "Or,,,,,,,,,, by As Maduntsev says, "there were a lot of prostitutes in the vodkhoz."

In addition, the leaders of the vodkhoz who paid the workers 30-50 kopecks. On the day, they wrote themselves a thousand or more rubles a month, not counting the business trips and other unreasonable payments.

However, the verdict turned out to be the most amazing in this process. Despite the significant amounts of the waste, the prosecutor requested ten years of imprisonment for three leaders of vodkhoz, and for their accomplices - from two to five years old. But the court reduced the measure of punishment to the main accused to the age of six. The rest received from five years to a year of imprisonment. Three accused were acquitted.

At the trial, they said a lot about the fact that the verdict should not scare, but shake the business workers. Make them work better and build cheaper. This is exactly what they achieved. All the following grandiose channels in Central Asia were built by the method of folk construction, when collective farmers worked almost free. After all, any government, whether it is worker-peasant or royal, sooner or later understands that the burden of state problems is most convenient to transfer to the shoulders of ordinary people.

"Everyone steals. Bills are a fool's errand"