Chiklin and Voschev travel to the village in order to retrieve the bodies but discover that Kozlov and Safronov have been brutally murdered. The peasants say that they do not know who murdered the men. Chiklin kills one of them out of anger, and a second peasant turns up dead under suspicious circumstances. A union organizer known only as “the activist” tells everyone that the latter peasant was the murderer. They bury Kozlov and Safronov before receiving a letter from Prushevsky, who says that Nastya has begun attending nursing school. Nastya's working class rhetoric, which she first used in order to fit in, is now violent in nature. She writes, "Liquidate the kulaks as a class. … Greetings to the collective farm, but not the kulaks."