Kulak

Kulaks ( Russian: кула́к, kulak, "fist", by extension "tight-fisted"; kurkuls in Ukraine, also used in Russian texts in Ukrainian contexts) were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to wealthy independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged ''en masse' from peasantry as a result of the Stolypin reform which began in 1906. According to the political theory of Marxism-Leninism developed in the early 1900s, the kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants, and were described by Vladimir LeninLenin, V.I., "Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!”, pp. 53-57 in his Collected Works, Vol. 28. as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine.” Marxism-Leninism dictated a revolution that would liberate poor peasants and farm laborers alongside the proletariat (urban and industrial workers). In addition, the planned economy of Soviet Bolshevism required the collectivization of farms and land to allow industrialization of large-scale agricultural production. In practice, these Marxist-Leninist theories led to years of conflicts and disruption of agriculture when kulaks resisted expropriation of their private property and Soviet officials responded with violent political repression.Mikhail Gorbachev. Memoirs. 769 pages. Publisher: Doubleday; 1st ed edition (September 1, 1996) ISBN 0385480199

Definitions

According to the Soviet terminology, the peasants were divided into three broad categories: bednyaks, or poor peasants; seredniaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the higher-income farmers who were presumably more successful, efficient farmers and had larger farms than most Russian peasants. In addition, there was a category of batraks, or landless seasonal agriculture workers for hire. The Stolypin reform created a new class of landowners who were allowed to acquire for credit a plot of land from the large estate owners, and the credit (a kind of mortgage loan) was to be repaid from farm work. In 1912, 16% of peasants (up from 11% in 1903) had relatively large endowments of over 8 acres (3.2 hectares) per male family member (a threshold used in statistics to distinguish between middle-class and prosperous farmers, i.e., kulaks). At that time an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the Soviets and proletariat. Serednyaks were considered unreliable, "hesitating" allies, and kulaks were seen as class enemies because they owned land and were independent economically. However, often those declared to be kulaks were not especially prosperous. The average value of goods confiscated from kulaks during the policy of " dekulakization" (раскулачивание) at the beginning of the 1930s was only $90–$210 (170-400 rubles) per household. Both peasants and Soviet officials were often uncertain as to what constituted a kulak, and the term was often used to label anyone who had more property than was considered "normal" according to subjective criteria. At first, being a kulak carried no penalty other than mistrust from the Soviet authorities. During the height of collectivization, however, people identified as kulaks were subjected to deportation and extrajudicial punishment, and those people were often killed.Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (2 vol., tr. 1970–74)Dmitri Volkogonov. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 1996, ISBN 0761507183 In May 1929 the Sovnarkom issued a decree that formalised the notion of "kulak household" (кулацкое хозяйство). Any of the following characteristics defined a kulak: Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7."On the characteristics of kulak farms subject to the Labor Code", Sovnarkom resolution, May 21, 1929, in: Collectivization of Agriculture: Main Resolutions of the Communist Party and Soviet Government 1927-1935, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of History, Moscow, 1957, p. 163 (Russian).

use of hired labor;
ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, butter-making rig), other processing equipment, or a complex machine with a mechanical motor;
systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities;
involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labor income".

By the last item, any peasant who sold his surplus goods on the market could be automatically classified as a kulak. In 1930 this list was extended to include those who were renting industrial plants, e.g., sawmills, or who rented land to other farmers. Grigory Zinoviev, a well-known Soviet politician, said in 1924, "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak." At the same time, ispolkoms (executive committees of local Soviets) of republics, oblasts, and krais were given rights to add other criteria for defining kulaks, depending on local conditions.

Dekulakization

In 1928, there was a food shortage in the cities and in the army. In response the Soviet government encouraged the formation of collective farms and, in 1929, introduced a policy of mandatory collectivization. Though collectivism was ultimately proved highly inefficient due in part to removal of traditional incentives for labor,Sowell, Thomas. (2000) Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy (2nd edition), ISBN 9780465081455 many peasants were nonetheless attracted to collectivization by the idea that they would be in a position to afford tractors and would enjoy increased production. Peasants were outraged by the thought of people abusing their tools/animals and using them as common property; they often retaliated against the state by smashing implements and killing animals. Live animals would have to be handed over to the collectives, but meat could be eaten; meat and hides could be concealed and/or sold. Many peasants chose to slaughter livestock rather than being obliged to let their personal assets become common property. In the first two months of 1930 millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats were slaughtered. Through this and bad weather a quarter of the entire nation’s livestock perished: a greater loss than had been sustained during the Civil War and a loss that was not recovered until the 1950s. This widespread slaughter caused Sovnarkom to issue a series of decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (хищнический убой скота)."On measures against malicious slaughter of livestock", Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom resolutions, January 16, 1930; November 1, 1930, in: Collectivization of Agriculture: Main Resolutions of the Communist Party and Soviet Government 1927-1935, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of History, Moscow, 1957, pp. 260, 336 (Russian). Many peasants also attempted to sabotage the collectives by attacking members and government officials. Stalin requested severe measures to put an end to the kulak resistance. In 1930, Stalin 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.Stalin, Joseph. “Concerning the Policy of Eliminating the Kulaks as a Class,” Krasnaya Zvezda, January 21, 1930, Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 189 The Communist party agreed to the use of force in the collectivization and dekulakization efforts. The kulaks were to be liquidated as a class and subject to one of three fates: death sentence, labor settlements (not to be confused with labor camps, although the former were also managed by the GULAG), or deportation "out of regions of total collectivization of the agriculture". Tens of thousands of kulaks were executed, property was expropriated to form collective farms, and many families were deported to unpopulated areas of Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Often local officials were assigned minimum quotas of kulaks to identify, and were forced to use their discretionary powers to "find" kulaks wherever they could. This led to many cases where a farmer who only employed his sons, or any family with a metal roof on their house, was labelled as kulaks and deported. The same happened to those labeled as podkulachniks (подкулачник), so-called "kulak helpers". A new wave of persecution, this time against "ex-kulaks," was started in 1937. It was part of the Great Purge, conducted by Nikolai Yezhov after the NKVD Order no. 00447. Those deemed ex-kulaks had only two options: death sentence or labor camps. Since there were essentially no rich or middle-class peasants left to arrest and in order to satisfy Stalin and Yezhov's demands for increasingly large quotas of convictions from each regional tribunal, the NKVD were forced to further terrorize the peasantry in an attempt to induce more denunciations. In the wave of round-ups that followed, the term kulak quickly lost even its previous semblance of distinction and became a genericized accusation (like wrecking) that could be leveled at anyone the troikas wished to convict. During the Great Purge, hundreds of thousands of peasants were falsely accused of being ex-kulaks and sent to the Gulag or executed based on circumstantial evidence, forged evidence or none at all. After being resettled to Siberia and Kazakhstan, many "kulaks" gained prosperity again. This fact served as a base of recriminations against some sections of NKVD that were in charge of the "labor settlements" (трудовые поселения) in 1938-1939, which permitted "kulakization" (окулачивание) of the "labor settlers" (трудопоселенцев). The fact that new settlers became more prosperous than the neighboring kolkhozes was explained by "wrecking" and " criminal negligence".

Numbers executed

The overwhelming majority of kulaks executed and imprisoned were male, but precise numbers are somewhat difficult to obtain. Many historians consider the great famine a result of the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," which complicates the estimation of death tolls. A wide range of death tolls has been suggested, from as many as 60 million suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to as few as 700,000 by Soviet news sources. A collection of estimates is maintained by Matthew White. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books say that 1,317,022 reached the destination. The remaining 486,370 may have died or escaped.

References

External links

The kulak, chapter: The first wave of collectivization of the book "Another view of Stalin" by Ludo Martens 1995

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