In 1930, a Red Army soldier returned to his native village to discover that a number of his neighbors – people whose socioeconomic status was similar to his own – had been dekulakized. The soldier went to the local soviet to lodge a protest. He told the soviet officials that if they considered his neighbors to be kulaks, then he, too, must be a kulak and should be dekulakized. Complying with the soldier's demands, the soviet issued a resolution calling for the dekulakization of the soldier “according to his personal wish.” At about the same time that the soldier found himself subject to voluntary dekulakization, a village teacher in the Central Black Earth Region faced a similar fate. Local authorities accused the teacher of being the daughter of a priest and therefore decided to dekulakize her. The teacher gathered together documentation to prove that she in fact was not the daughter of a priest, but was unable to convince the local authorities, who claimed, “If her mother visited the priest, then it is possible that the priest is her father.” During this time and after, for a glass of vodka or a bottle of samogon (moonshine), a kulak could be transformed into a poor peasant or, in the absence of a glass of vodka or a bottle of samogon, a poor peasant could be transformed into a kulak. These were years of widespread repression in the Soviet countryside, as officials foraged through the villages in search of class enemies and proclaimed a “second coming” (to borrow a phrase from Platonov's Chevengur) for real and perceived enemies of the state.