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Kulak (/ˈkuːlæk/ KOO-lak; Russian: кула́к; plural: кулаки́, kulakí, 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul (Ukrainian: куркуль) or golchomag (Azerbaijani: qolçomaq, plural: qolçomaqlar), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 3 ha (8 acres) of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak became a vague reference to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution.^[1] In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of podkulachnik (almost wealthy peasant); these were considered "sub-kulaks".^[2]

Kulaks referred to former peasants in the Russian Empire who became landowners and credit-loaners after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and during the Stolypin reform of 1906 to 1914, which aimed to reduce radicalism amongst the peasantry and produce profit-minded, politically conservative farmers. During the Russian Revolution, kulak was used to chastise peasants who withheld grain from the Bolsheviks.^[3] According to Marxist–Leninist political theories of the early 20th century, the kulaks were considered class enemies of the poorer peasants.^[4]^[5] Vladimir Lenin described them as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten themselves during famines",^[6] declaring revolution against them.^[7]

During the first five-year plan, Joseph Stalin's all-out campaign to take land ownership and organisation away from the peasantry meant that, according to historian Robert Conquest, "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [2 or 2.5 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeled kulaks.^[8] In 1929, Soviet officials officially classified kulaks according to subjective criteria, such as the use of hired labour. Under dekulakization, government officials seized farms and killed many kulaks,^[4]^[9] deported others to labor camps, and drove many others to migrate to the cities following the loss of their property to the collectives.^[10]

Definitions

The term was first used in the 19th century as a pejorative to refer to wealthier peasants who owned land and offered credit to poorer peasants. Soviet terminology divided the Russian peasants into three broad categories:

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

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

History

Pre-Revolution

Various tsarist officials and their opposition had expressed negative views of kulaks as early as the 19th century. Judge Anatoly Koni compared kulaks to profiteers, arguing that they are not tied to the land by labor or personal memories, but by exploiting its resources and people.^[11] These sentiments are echoed in the writings of people such as Alexey Yermolov,^[12] Alexander Engelhardt,^[13] and Roman Zimmerman [ru].^[14]

In his 1899 work Small public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants, governor of Penza Ivan Koshko noted that the kulaks had taken advantage of the inactivity of state-owned rural banks after the abolition of serfdom, forcing poorer peasants into private, predatory loans, thereby "[taking] over the entire peasant economy."^[15] He stated that as many as half of the 90 million peasant population were subjected to these exploitative relationships with kulaks, and that the latter was able to at least roughly 500 million rubles annually.^[16] A few years later, after the turn of the century, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin would argue that becoming a kulak was the only way out of poverty for many, although at the expense of fellow peasants.^[17]

The Stolypin reform also aided in the development of the kulak class 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 3 ha (8 acres) 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.^[18]

1917–1918

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the Soviets and proletariat; serednyaks were considered unreliable, hesitating allies, and kulaks were identified as class enemies, with the term generally referring to "peasant producers who hired labourers or exploited their neighbours in some other way" according to historian Robert W. Davies.^[19] Robert Conquest argues that the definition of a kulak was later expanded to include those peasants who owned livestock; however, a middle peasant who did not hire laborers and was little engaged in trade "might yet (if he had a large family) hold three cows and two horses."^[20]

There were other measures that indicated the kulaks as not being especially prosperous. Both peasants and Soviet officials were uncertain as to who constituted a kulak; they often used the term to label anyone who had more property than was considered normal according to subjective criteria, and personal rivalries also played a part in the classification of people as enemies. Officials arbitrarily applied the definition and abused their power.^[21] Conquest wrote: "The land of the landlords had been spontaneously seized by the peasantry in 1917–18. A small class of richer peasants with around fifty to eighty acres [20 to 32 ha] had then been expropriated by the Bolsheviks. Thereafter a Marxist conception of class struggle led to an almost totally imaginary class categorization being inflicted in the villages, where peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [2 or 2.5 ha] more than their neighbors were now being labeled 'kulaks,' and a class war against them was being declared."^[8]

In the summer of 1918, Moscow sent armed detachments to the villages and ordered them to seize grain. Peasants who resisted the seizures were killed. According to Richard Pipes, "the Communists declared war on the rural population for two purposes: to forcibly extract food for growing industry (so-called First five-year plan) in cities and the Red Army and insinuate their authority into the countryside, which remained largely unaffected by the Bolshevik coup."^[3] A large-scale revolt ensued, and it was during this period in August 1918 that Vladimir Lenin sent a directive known as Lenin's Hanging Order: "Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. ... Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [kilometers] around the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks."^[22] Lenin had justified the state response to kulak revolts due to the 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of the White Terror. He summarised his view that either the "kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatory kulak minority […] There can be no middle course".^[23]

1930s

The average value of the goods which were confiscated from the kulaks during the policy of dekulakization (раскулачивание) at the beginning of the 1930s was only 170–400 rubles (US$90–210) per household.^[4] During the height of Collectivization in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, people who were identified as kulaks were subjected to deportation and extrajudicial punishments. They were frequently murdered in local campaigns of violence, while others were formally executed after they were convicted of being kulaks.^[9]^[24]^[25]

In May 1929, the Sovnarkom issued a decree which formalised the notion of 'kulak household' (кулацкое хозяйство), according to which any of the following criteria defined a person as a kulak:^[4]^[26]

Use of hired labor.
Ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, 'butter-making rig'), other processing equipment, or a complex machine with a motor.
Systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities.
Involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labor income."

In 1930, this list was expanded so it could include people who were renting industrial plants, e.g. sawmills, or people who rented land to other farmers. At the same time, the ispolkoms (executive committees of local Soviets) of republics, oblasts, and krais were granted the right to add other criteria to the list so other people could be classified as kulaks, depending on local conditions.^[4]

Dekulakization

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."^[27] 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."^[28] 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.^[29]

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 supposed to be sent to other areas within their home provinces.^[30] 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.^[31] In response to the widespread slaughter, the Sovnarkom issued decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (хищнический убой скота).^[32] 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."^[33]

Human impact

From 1929 to 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^[34] and peasants who did not show signs of starvation were especially suspected of hiding food.^[35] 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 ... ."^[36]

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]

Death tolls

Stalin issued an order for the kulaks "to be liquidated as a class";^[37] according to Roman Serbyn, this was the main cause of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and was a genocide,^[38] while other scholars disagree and propose more than one cause.^[39]^[40]^[41] This famine has complicated attempts to identify the number of deaths arising from the executions of kulaks. A wide range of death tolls has been suggested, from as many as six million as suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,^[42] to the much lower number of 700,000 as estimated by Soviet sources. According to data from the Soviet archives, which were only published internationally in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books which are based on these sources have stated that 1,317,022 people reached the final destinations ^{[citation needed]}. The fate of the remaining 486,370 people cannot be verified. Deportations continued on a smaller scale after 1931 ^{[citation needed]}. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521 ^{[citation needed]}. Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of the victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 people executed.^[43]

References

^ Omarov, Vahid (November 27, 2012). "Azərbaycan SSR-də 1920-1940-cı illərdə sənayeləşdirmə və zorakı kolxozlaşdırma" (in Azerbaijani). Archived from the original on August 14, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
^ Mace, James Earnest; Heretz, Leonid (1990). Investigation of the Ukrainian famine, 1932–1933: Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 1215 – via Google Books.
^ ^a ^b Pipes, Richard (2001). Communism: A Brief History. Random House Digital. pp. 39–. ISBN 978-0-679-64050-9. Archived from the original on 24 June 2013. Retrieved 7 January 2013 – via Google Books.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
^ Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2000). "The Party Is Always Right". Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 22. ISBN 9780195050011. Archived from the original on 2022-01-16. Retrieved 2021-11-20 – via Google Books. The Soviet regime was adept at creating its own enemies, whom it then suspected of conspiracy against the state. It did so first by declaring that all members of certain social classes and estates – primarily former nobles, members of the bourgeoisie, priests, and kulaks – were by definition 'class enemies,' resentful of their loss of privilege and likely to engage in counterrevolutionary conspiracy to recover them. The next step, taken at the end of the 1920s, was the 'liquidation as a class' of certain categories of class enemies, notably kulaks and, to a lesser extent, Nepmen and priests. This meant that the victims were expropriated, deprived of the possibility of continuing their previous way of earning a living, and often arrested and exiled.
^ Rubinstein, David (2001). Culture, Structure and Agency: Toward a Truly Multidimensional Sociology. SAGE Publications. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-7619-1928-5. Archived from the original on 2016-06-25. Retrieved 2016-03-18 – via Google Books.
^ Lenin, Vladimir (1965). Riordan, Jim (ed.). Comrade Workers, Forward to the Last, Decisive Fight!. Lenin Collected Works. Vol. 28. Progress Publisher. pp. 53–57. Archived from the original on 8 November 2017. Retrieved 20 November 2021 – via Marxists Internet Archive.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Conquest, Robert (2001). Reflections on a Ravaged Century. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 94. ISBN 978-0-393-32086-2. Archived from the original on 24 June 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2013 – via Google Books.
^ ^a ^b Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev (1 September 1995). Memoirs (1st ed.). Doubleday. 769 pp. ISBN 0-385-48019-9.
^ McCauley, Martin (1996). Stalin and Stalinism. Longman. ISBN 9780582276581.
^ Koni, Anatoliy (2022). Best Speeches Лучшие Речи (in Russian). AST. pp. 334–448. ISBN 9785171457136.
^ Ermolov, Alexey (1892). Crop failure and national disaster Неурожай и народное бедствие (PDF) (in Russian). p. 270.
^ Engelhardt, Alexander (1987). Letters from the village (1872-1887) Письма из деревни. pp. 521–522.
^ Zimmerman, Roman (1899). Kulakism: usury and its socio-economic significance Кулачество — ростовщичество и его общественно-экономическое значение.
^ Koshko, Ivan (1899). Small public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants Мелкий народный кредит как могучее средство борьбы с обеднением нашего крестьянина (PDF) (in Russian). p. 2.
^ Koshko, Ivan (1899). Small public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants Мелкий народный кредит как могучее средство борьбы с обеднением нашего крестьянина (PDF) (in Russian). p. 7.
^ Stolypin, Pyotr (2006). The boundaries of a politician's talent П.А Столыпин. Грани таланта политика (in Russian). ROSSPEN. pp. 68–74.
^ Kulaks (Korkulism) Archived 2017-11-08 at the Wayback Machine at the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia.
^ Davies, R.W. (1980). The socialist offensive : the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, 1929–1930. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan Press. p. 23. ISBN 0-333-26171-2. OCLC 781061107. In the mid-1920 sometimes it was still used in this sense, but now, it was generally used to refer to all peasant producers who hired labourers or exploited their neighbours in some other way.
^ Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 76.
^ Viola, Lynne (January 1996). "Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance" (PDF). Oxford University Press. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-08-15. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
^ Pipes, Richard (1 September 2001). Communism: A Brief History. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-679-64050-9. Archived from the original on 24 June 2013. Retrieved 7 January 2013 – via Google Books.
^ Ryan, James (25 June 2012). Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. Routledge. pp. 105–106. ISBN 978-1-135-11459-6.
^ Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (2 vol., tr. 1970–74)
^ Dmitri Volkogonov. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 1996, ISBN 0-7615-0718-3
^ "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).
^ Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service, page 266
^ Viola, Lynne; et al., eds. (2005). "The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930 : The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside". Yale University Press. Retrieved 2018-03-26 – via ProQuest Ebook Central.
^ Suslov, Andrei (July 2019). "'Dekulakization' as a Facet of Stalin's Social Revolution (The Case of Perm Region)". The Russian Review. 78 (3): 371–391. doi:10.1111/russ.12236. ISSN 1467-9434. S2CID 199145405. Retrieved 21 November 2021 – via ResearchGate.
^ Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service, page 267
^ Conquest, Robert (1987). The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine. Oxford University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-19-505180-3. Archived from the original on 11 January 2014. Retrieved 2 August 2013 – via Google Books.
^ "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).
^ Stalin, Joseph. "Concerning the Policy of Eliminating the Kulaks as a Class," Krasnaya Zvezda, January 21, 1930, Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 189
^ Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 229.
^ Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 230.
^ Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 244.
^ Footnote on page 88 of book by Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (2005). H.T. Willetts, tr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
^ Serbyn, Roman (2006). "The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 as Genocide in the Light of the UN Convention of 1948". The Ukrainian Quarterly. 62 (2): 186–204. Archived from the original on 20 November 2021. Retrieved 20 November 2021 – via Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
^ Harrison, Mark (1 March 2005), Davies, Wheatcroft 2004 (PDF) (review), University of Warwick, pp. 1–2, archived (PDF) from the original on 30 September 2009, retrieved 21 November 2021, The main findings are as follows. The authors' best estimate of the number of famine deaths in 1932–1933 is 5.5 to 6.5 millions (p. 401), the total population of the Soviet Union at that time being roughly 140 millions; the main scope for error in famine deaths arises from unregistered deaths and uncertainties over 'normal' infant mortality. The main areas affected were the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the north Caucasus. There was an increase in urban mortality, but most deaths were recorded amongst the agricultural population.
^ Ellman, Michael (June 2007). "Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 Revisited" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 59 (4). Routledge: 663–693. doi:10.1080/09668130701291899. S2CID 53655536. Archived from the original on 14 October 2007.
^ Aldous, Richard; Kotkin, Stephen (8 November 2017). "Studying Stalin". The American Interest. Archived from the original on 8 November 2021. Retrieved 21 November 2021. It was a foreseeable byproduct of the collectivization campaign that Stalin forcibly imposed, but not an intentional murder. He needed the peasants to produce more grain, and to export the grain to buy the industrial machinery for the industrialization. Peasant output and peasant production was critical for Stalin's industrialization.
^ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, and Edward E. Ericson. "Chapter 2: The Peasant Plague." The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. New York: HarperPerennial, 2007.
^ Orlando Figes. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Archived 2016-06-25 at the Wayback Machine, Metropolitan Books, 2007, p. 240. ISBN 0805074619
^ Perez, Gilberto (Summer 2011). "Dovzhenko: Folk Tale and Revolution". Film Quarterly. 64 (4): 17–21. doi:10.1525/FQ.2011.64.4.17 – via Performing Arts Periodicals Database.