Kulak

Kulak(/ˈkuːlæk/KOO-lak;Russian:кула́к;plural: кулаки́,kulakí,'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), alsokurkul(Ukrainian:куркуль) orgolchomag(Azerbaijani:qolçomaq,plural:qolçomaqlar), was the term which was used to describepeasantswho owned over 3 ha (8 acres) of land towards the end of theRussian Empire.In the earlySoviet Union,particularly inSoviet RussiaandAzerbaijan,kulakbecame a vague reference toproperty ownershipamong peasants who were considered hesitant allies of theBolshevik Revolution.^[1]InUkraineduring 1930–1931, there also existed a term ofpodkulachnik(almost wealthy peasant); these were considered "sub-kulaks".^[2]

Kulaksreferred to former peasants in the Russian Empire who became landowners and credit-loaners after theabolition of serfdomin 1861 and during theStolypin reformof 1906 to 1914, which aimed to reduce radicalism amongst the peasantry and produce profit-minded, politically conservative farmers. During theRussian Revolution,kulakwas used to chastise peasants who withheld grain from theBolsheviks.^[3]According toMarxist–Leninistpolitical theories of the early 20th century, the kulaks were consideredclass enemiesof the poorer peasants.^[4]^[5]Vladimir Lenindescribed them as "bloodsuckers,vampires,plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten themselves during famines ",^[6]declaring revolution against them.^[7]

During thefirst five-year plan,Joseph Stalin's all-out campaign to take land ownership and organisation away from the peasantry meant that, according to historianRobert Conquest,"peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [2 or 2.5 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeledkulaks.^[8]In 1929, Soviet officials officially classified kulaks according to subjective criteria, such as the use of hired labour. Underdekulakization,government officials seized farms and killed many kulaks,^[4]^[9]deported others tolabor 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 ofbatrak,landless seasonal agricultural workers for hire.^[4]

History

Pre-Revolution

Various tsarist officials and their opposition had expressed negative views ofkulaksas early as the 19th century. JudgeAnatoly Konicomparedkulaksto 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 asAlexey Yermolov,^[12]Alexander Engelhardt,^[13]andRoman Zimmerman[ru].^[14]

In his 1899 workSmall public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants,governor ofPenzaIvan Koshko noted that thekulakshad 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 withkulaks,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 MinisterPyotr Stolypinwould argue that becoming akulakwas the only way out of poverty for many, although at the expense of fellow peasants.^[17]

TheStolypin reformalso aided in the development of thekulakclass by allowing peasants to acquire plots of land on credit from thelarge 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. thekulaks). 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 theRussian Revolutionof 1917, theBolsheviksconsidered onlybatraksandbednyaksas true allies of theSovietsand proletariat;serednyakswere considered unreliable, hesitating allies, andkulakswere identified asclass enemies,with the term generally referring to "peasant producers who hired labourers or exploited their neighbours in some other way" according to historianRobert W. Davies.^[19]Robert Conquest argues that the definition of akulakwas 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 thekulaksas not being especially prosperous. Both peasants and Soviet officials were uncertain as to who constituted akulak;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 ofclass struggleled 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 toRichard Pipes,"the Communists declared war on the rural population for two purposes: to forcibly extract food for growing industry (so-calledFirst 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 thatVladimir Leninsent a directive known asLenin's Hanging Order:"Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred knownkulaks,rich men, bloodsuckers.... Do it in such a way that for hundreds ofversts[kilometers] aroundthe people will see, tremble, know, shout:they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsuckerkulaks."^[22]Lenin had justified the state response tokulakrevolts due to the 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of theWhite Terror.He summarised his view that either the "kulaksmassacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatorykulakminority […] There can be no middle course ".^[23]

1930s

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

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

Use of hired labor.
Ownership of amill,acreamery(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, theispolkoms(executive committees of local Soviets) of republics,oblasts,andkraiswere granted the right to add other criteria to the list so other people could be classified askulaks,depending on local conditions.^[4]

Dekulakization

In July 1929, official Soviet policy continued to state that thekulaksshould not be terrorized and should be enlisted into thecollective farms,but Stalin disagreed: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against thekulaks,break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production ofkolkhozesandsovkhozes."^[27]A decree by theCentral 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 "kulakliquidation "came without precise instructions, and encouraged local leaders to take radical action, which resulted in physical elimination. The campaign to" liquidate thekulaksas a class "constituted the main part of Stalin'ssocial engineeringpolicies 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, thePolitburoapproved the dissolving of thekulaksas a class. Three categories ofkulakswere distinguished:kulakswho were supposed to be sent to theGulags,kulakswho were supposed to be relocated to distant provinces, such as the northUralsandKazakhstan,kulakswho 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 endkulakresistance. 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 thekulaksas 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 theState Political Directorate(the secret police) with arrests and deportations were, in the words ofVasily 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 'kulakbastards,' 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 intocognitive dissonance,rationalizing their actions through ideology.Lev Kopelev,who later became a Sovietdissident,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 thekulaks"to be liquidated as a class";^[37]according toRoman Serbyn,this was the main cause of theSoviet famine of 1932–1933and was agenocide,^[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 ofkulaks.A wide range of death tolls has been suggested, from as many as six million as suggested byAleksandr 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 tolabor coloniesand 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 ofkulaksand their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521^{[citation needed]}.Formerkulaksand their families made up the majority of the victims of theGreat Purgeof 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).Archivedfrom the original on August 14, 2019.RetrievedJune 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 – viaGoogle Books.
^^a ^bPipes, Richard(2001).Communism: A Brief History.Random HouseDigital. pp. 39–.ISBN 978-0-679-64050-9.Archivedfrom the original on 24 June 2013.Retrieved7 January2013– viaGoogle Books.
^^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^fRobert 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.Archivedfrom the original on 2022-01-16.Retrieved2021-11-20– viaGoogle 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.Archivedfrom the original on 2016-06-25.Retrieved2016-03-18– viaGoogle 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.Archivedfrom the original on 8 November 2017.Retrieved20 November2021– viaMarxists Internet Archive.
^^a ^b ^c ^d ^eConquest, Robert(2001).Reflections on a Ravaged Century.W. W. Norton & Company.p. 94.ISBN 978-0-393-32086-2.Archivedfrom the original on 24 June 2013.Retrieved3 January2013– viaGoogle Books.
^^a ^bGorbachev, 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 SpeechesЛучшие Речи(in Russian). AST. pp. 334–448.ISBN 9785171457136.
^Ermolov, Alexey (1892).Crop failure and national disasterНеурожай 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 significanceКулачество — ростовщичество и его общественно-экономическое значение.
^Koshko, Ivan (1899).Small public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasantsМелкий 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 peasantsМелкий народный кредит как могучее средство борьбы с обеднением нашего крестьянина(PDF)(in Russian). p. 7.
^Stolypin, Pyotr (2006).The boundaries of a politician's talentП.А Столыпин. Грани таланта политика(in Russian). ROSSPEN. pp. 68–74.
^Kulaks (Korkulism)Archived2017-11-08 at theWayback Machineat theUkrainian 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.Retrieved2021-06-03.
^Pipes, Richard(1 September 2001).Communism: A Brief History.Random HouseDigital, Inc. p. 40.ISBN 978-0-679-64050-9.Archivedfrom the original on 24 June 2013.Retrieved7 January2013– viaGoogle 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 Biographyby 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.Retrieved2018-03-26– 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.Retrieved21 November2021– via ResearchGate.
^Stalin: A Biographyby 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.Archivedfrom the original on 11 January 2014.Retrieved2 August2013– viaGoogle 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.Archivedfrom the original on 20 November 2021.Retrieved20 November2021– 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,retrieved21 November2021,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.Archivedfrom the original on 14 October 2007.
^Aldous, Richard; Kotkin, Stephen (8 November 2017)."Studying Stalin".The American Interest.Archivedfrom the original on 8 November 2021.Retrieved21 November2021.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.
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^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.

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