Kulak

Illustration of the three broad categories of peasants by Soviet magazine Prozhektor published by Nikolai Bukharin, an issue of 31 May 1926. Caption under illustration says: "We received interesting photos from Novokhopersky county, Voronezh Governorate which shows situation in modern village."

Soviet terminology divided the Russian peasants into three broad categories:

1. Bednyak, or poor peasants.
2. Serednyak, or mid-income peasants.
3. Kulak, the higher-income farmers who had larger farms.

In addition, they had a category of batrak, landless seasonal agricultural workers for hire.[4]

The Stolypin reform created a new class of landowners by allowing peasants to acquire plots of land on credit from the large estate owners. They were to repay the credit (a kind of mortgage loan) from their farm earnings. By 1912, 16% of peasants (up from 11% in 1903) had relatively large endowments of over 8 acres (3.2 ha) per male family member (a threshold used in statistics to distinguish between middle-class and prosperous farmers, i.e. the kulaks). At that time, an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children. The number of such farmers amounted to 20% of the rural population, producing almost 50% of marketable grain.[11]

In July 1929, official Soviet policy continued to state that the kulaks should not be terrorized and should be enlisted into the collective farms, but Stalin disagreed: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes."[19] A decree by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 5 January 1930 was titled "On the pace of collectivization and state assistance to collective-farm construction."[20] The official goal of "kulak liquidation" came without precise instructions, and encouraged local leaders to take radical action, which resulted in physical elimination. The campaign to "liquidate the kulaks as a class" constituted the main part of Stalin's social engineering policies in the early 1930s. Andrei Suslov argues that the seizure of peasants' property led directly to the destruction of an entire social group, that of the peasant‐owners.[21]

On 30 January 1930, the Politburo approved the dissolving of the kulaks as a class. Three categories of kulaks were distinguished: kulaks who were supposed to be sent to the Gulags, kulaks who were supposed to be relocated to distant provinces, such as the north Urals and Kazakhstan, kulaks who were was supposed to be sent to other areas within their home provinces.[22] The peasantry were required to relinquish their farm animals to government authorities. Many chose to slaughter their livestock rather than give them up to collective farms. In the first two months of 1930, peasants killed millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats, with the meat and hides being consumed and bartered. For instance, the Soviet Party Congress reported in 1934 that 26.6 million head of cattle and 63.4 million sheep had been lost.[23] In response to the widespread slaughter, the Sovnarkom issued decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (хищнический убой скота).[24] Stalin ordered severe measures to end kulak resistance. In 1930, he declared: "In order to oust the 'kulaks' as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development. ... That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class."[25]

From 1929–1933, the grain quotas were artificially heightened. Peasants attempted to hide the grain and bury it. According to historian Robert Conquest, every brigade was equipped with a long iron bar which it would use to probe the ground for grain caches[26] and peasants who did not show signs of starvation were especially suspected of hiding food.[27] Conquest states: "When the snow melted true starvation began. People had swollen faces and legs and stomachs. They could not contain their urine... And now they ate anything at all. They caught mice, rats, sparrows, ants, earthworms. They ground up bones into flour, and did the same with leather and shoe soles ... ."[28]

The party activists who helped the State Political Directorate (the secret police) with arrests and deportations were, in the words of Vasily Grossman, "all people who knew one another well, and knew their victims, but in carrying out this task they became dazed, stupefied."[8] Grossman commented: "They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children 'kulak bastards,' screaming 'bloodsuckers!' ... They had sold themselves on the idea that so-called 'kulaks' were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a 'parasite's' table; the 'kulak' child was loathsome, the young 'kulak' girl was lower than a louse."[8] Party activists brutalizing the starving villagers fell into cognitive dissonance, rationalizing their actions through ideology. Lev Kopelev, who later became a Soviet dissident, explained: "It was excruciating to see and hear all of this. And even worse to take part in it. ... And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn't give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan."[8]

• Classicide
• Earth (1930), a Ukrainian film by Alexander Dovzhenko concerning a community of farmers and their resistance to collectivization. Earth depicts the social struggles between kulaks and a youth who introduces a tractor to a Ukrainian village.[36]
• Gombeen man
• Landlord
• Land tenure
• Ural-Siberian method
• Yeoman

Look up kulak in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Conquest, Robert. 1987. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
• Douglas, Tottle. 1987. Fraud, Famine And Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard
• Figes, Orlando. 2007. The whisperers: private life in Stalin's Russia. Macmillan. … detailed histories of actual Kulak families. online free to borrow
• Kaznelson, Michael. 2007. "Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak children and dekulakisation." Europe-Asia Studies 59(7):1163–77.
• Lewin, Moshe. 1966. "Who was the Soviet kulak?." Europe‐Asia Studies 18(2):189–212.
• Viola, Lynne. 1986. "The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter 1929–1930: A Reevaluation of the Legislation." Slavic Review 45(3):503–24.
• —— 2000. "The Peasants' Kulak: Social Identities and Moral Economy in the Soviet Countryside in the 1920s." Canadian Slavonic Papers 42(4):431–60.
• Vossler, Ron, narrator. 2006. "We'll Meet Again in Heaven." US: Prairie Public and Roadshow Productions.
  • "This thirty-minute documentary is a searing chronicle of a forgotten genocide and a lost people, whose '... misery screams to the heavens.' The lost people are the ethnic German minority living in Soviet Ukraine, who wrote their American relatives about the starvation, forced labor, and execution that were almost daily fare in Soviet Ukraine during this period, 1928–1938...major funding by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota."