Dictionary:

kulak

  (kū-lăk', kū'lăk', -läk')

A prosperous landed peasant in czarist Russia, characterized by the Communists during the October Revolution as an exploiter.

[Russian, fist, kulak, probably of Turkic origin.]

In official Soviet parlance, the kulak was a rich peasant who exploited private labour. He was designated for ‘liquidation as a class’ by Stalin during collectivization in the 1930s. In practice, however, the kulak was frequently the best farmer, whose destruction irrevocably harmed Soviet agriculture.

— Stephen Whitefield

For more information on kulak, visit Britannica.com.

The term kulak came into use after emancipation in 1861, describing peasants who profited from their peers. While kulak connotes the power of the fist, the nearly synonymous term miroyed means "mir-eater." At first the term "kulak" did not refer to the newly prosperous peasants, but rather to village extortioners who consume the commune, men of special rapacity, their wealth derived from usury or trading rather than from agriculture. The term never acquired precise scientific or economic definition. Peasants had a different understanding of the kulaks than outsiders; however, both definitions focused on social and moral aspects. During the twentieth century Lenin and Stalin defined the kulaks in economic and political terms as the capitalist strata of a polarized peasantry. Exploitation was the central element in the peasants' definition of the miroyed as well as in outsiders' definition of the kulak. Peasants, by contrast, attributed power to the kulak and limited their condemnation to peasants who exploited members of their own community. The kulaks also played an important political role in self-government of the peasant community. In the communal gathering they controlled decision making and had great influence on the opinion of the rest of the peasants.

The meaning of the term changed after the October Revolution, as the prerevolutionary type of kulak seldom survived in the village. In the 1920s the kulaks were in most instances simply wealthier peasants who, unlike their predecessors, were incontestably devoted to agriculture. They often were only slightly distinguishable from the middle peasants. Thus many Bolshevik leaders denied the existence of kulaks in the Soviet countryside. When in the mid-1920s the question of differentiation of the peasantry became part of the political debate, the statisticians had to provide a picture based on Lenin's assumption of class division. As social differentiation was still quite weak, it was impossible to define a clear class of capitalist peasants. The use of hired laborers and the leasing of land was under control of the rural soviets. Traditional forms of exploitation in the countryside, such as usury and trading, had lost their significance due to the growing cooperative organization of the peasantry. Since the use of hired laborers - a sign of capitalist exploitation - made it difficult to find a significant number of peasant capitalists for statistical purposes, a mixture of signs of wealth and obscure indicators of exploitation came into use in definition of the kulak: for example, ownership of at least three draught animals, sown area of more than eleven hectares, ownership of a trading establishment even without hired help, ownership of a complex and costly agricultural machine or of a considerable quantity of good quality implements, and hiring out of means of production. In general, the existence of one criterion was enough to define the peasant household as kulak. The statisticians thus determined that 3.9 percent of the peasantry consisted of kulaks.

It was exactly its indefiniteness that allowed the Bolsheviks to use the term kulak to initiate class war in the Soviet countryside toward the end of the 1920s. In order to force the peasants into the kolkhoz, the Politburo declared the almost nonexistent group of kulaks to be class enemies. Every peasant who was unwilling to join the kolkhoz had to fear being classified as kulak and subjected to expropriation and deportation. The justification lay in the political role the stronger peasants played in the communal assemblies. Together with the bulk of the peasants they were skeptical of any ideas of collective farming. The sheer existence of successful individual peasants ran counter to the Bolshevik aim of collectivization.

Due to the political pressure of new regulations for disenfranchisement in the 1927 election campaign and expropriation by the introduction of an excessive and prohibitive individual taxation in 1928, the number of kulaks started to decrease. This process was called self-dekulakization, meaning the selling of means of production, reducing the rent of land, and the leasing of implements to poorer farms. It was easy for the kulak to bring himself socially and economically down to the situation of a middle peasant. He only had to sell his agricultural machine, dismiss his batrak (hired laborer), or close his enterprise for there to be nothing left of the kulak as defined by the law. Several kulaks sought to escape the blows by flight to the towns, to other villages, or even into the kolkhozy if they were admitted.

On December 27, 1929, Stalin announced the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, that is, their expropriation and deportation. For the sake of the general collectivization the kulaks were divided into three different groups. The first category, the socalled "counterrevolutionary kulak-activists, fighting against collectivization" should be either arrested or shot on the spot; their families were to be deported. The second category, "the richest kulaks," were to be deported together with their families into remote areas. The rest of the kulaks were to be resettled locally. The Politburo not only planned the deportation of kulaks, ordering between 3 to 5 percent of the peasant farms to be liquidated and their means of production to be given to the kolkhoz, but also fixed the exact number of deportees and determined their destinations. The kulaks were clearly needed as class enemies to drive the collectivization process forward: After the liquidation of the kulaks in early 1930, and during the second major wave of collectivization in 1931, the Politburo ordered a certain percentage of the remaining peasant farms to be defined as kulaks and liquidated. Even if a peasant was obviously not wealthy, the term podkulak (walking alongside the kulaks) enabled the worker brigades to expropriate and arrest him.

Between 1930 and 1933, some 600,000 to 800,000 peasant households consisting of 3.5 to 5 million people, were declared to be kulaks, expropriated, and turned out of their houses. As local resettlement proved difficult, deportation hit more families than originally planned. By the end of 1931, about 380,000 to 390,000 kulak households consisting of about two million people were deported and brought to special settlements in remote areas, mostly in northern Russia or Siberia. Between 1933 and 1939, another 500,000 people reached the special settlements, mostly deportees from the North Caucasus during the famine of 1933. About one-fourth of the deportees did not survive the transport or the first years in the special settlements. After the new constitution of 1936, the term kulak fell out of use. At the beginning of 1941, 930,000 people were still registered in the special settlements. They were finally reinstated with their civilian rights during or shortly after World War II.

Bibliography

Frierson, Cathy Anne. (1992). From Narod to Kulak: Peasant Images in Russia, 1870 - 1885. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Lewin, Moshe. (1966/1967). "Who was the Soviet Kulak?" Soviet Studies 18:189 - 212.

Merl, Stephan. (1990). "Socio-economic Differentiation of the Peasantry." In From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR, ed. Robert W. Davies. London: Macmillan Press.

Viola, Lynne. (1996). Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press.

—STEPHAN MERL

For the Belgian university, see KULAK.

The collectivisation campaign in the USSR, 1930s. The slogan reads: "We kolkhoz farmers, on the basis of complete collectivisation, will liquidate the kulaks as a class."

Kulaks (Russian: кула́к, kulak, "fist", literally meaning tight-fisted; Ukrainian: курку́ль, kurkul) is a pejorative term extensively used in Soviet political language to define better-off peasants who were labeled class enemy of the poorer peasants ^[1]. The word originally referred to independent farmers in Russia who owned larger farms and used hired labor, as a result of the Stolypin reform introduced since 1906. Peter Stolypin's reforms resulted in the creation of a class of landowners who became independent farmers and supported the Tsar's government. In 1912, 16% (11% in 1903) of Russian farmers had over 8 acres (32,000 m²) per male family member (a threshold used to distinguish middle-class and prosperous farmers in statistics). At that time an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children.

Extermination of Kulaks and destruction of their independent farms eventually caused problems in agriculture and economy of the Soviet Union, as told by Mikhail Gorbachev whose family were kulaks and had suffered from political repressions under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.^[2]

Definitions

According to the Soviet terminology, the peasantry was divided into three broad categories: bednyaks, or poor peasants, seredniaks, or mid-income peasants, and kulaks, the high-income farmers who were presumably more successful and efficient farmers. In addition, there was a category of batraks, or landless seasonal agriculture workers for hire ^[1].

After the Russian Revolution, 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 policy of "dekulakization" in the beginning of 1930s was only $90-$210 per household ^[1]. 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 penalties, other than mistrust from the Soviet authorities. During the height of collectivisation, however, people identified as kulaks were subjected to extrajudicial punishment and were often killed.^[3][4][5]

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 ^[1] :

• usage of hired labour;
• ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, butter-making rig), or other complex equipment, or a complex machine with mechanical motor;
• systematic letting of agricultural equipment or facilities for rent;
• involvement in commerce, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other types of non-labour occupation".

By the last item, any peasant who sold his surplus on the market could be automatically classified as kulak. In 1930 this list was extended by including those who were letting industrial plants, e.g., sawmills, and who rented land to other farmers. Gregory 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, depending on local conditions ^[1].

Repression under Stalin

In 1928, there was a food shortage in the cities and in the army. The Soviet government encouraged the formation of collective farms and, in 1929, introduced a policy of collectivisation. Some peasants were attracted to collectivisation by the idea that they would be in a position to afford tractors and would enjoy increased production.

Whether peasants were resisting expropriation and exile or collectivisation and servitude they often retaliated against the state by smashing implements and killing animals. Live animals would have to be handed over to the collectives whereas meat and hides could respectively be consumed and concealed or sold. Many peasants chose to slaughter livestock, even horses, rather than to pass it into 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 compensated for until the 1960s.

This huge slaughtering caused Sovnarkom to issue a series of decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (хищнический убой скота). Many peasants also attempted to sabotage the collectives by attacking members and government officials.

Stalin requested harsh measures to put an end to the kulak resistance. In a speech given at a Marxist agrarian conference, he stated that, "From a policy of limiting the exploitative tendencies of the kulaks, we have gone over to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class." The party agreed to the use of force in the collectivisation and ‘dekulakization’ efforts. The kulaks were to be liquidated as a class and subject to one of three fates: death sentence, labour settlements (not to be confused with labor camps, although the former were also managed by the GULAG), or deportation "out of regions of total collectivisation of the agriculture". Tens of thousands of alleged 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, being labelled kulaks and deported.

The same fate met those labelled "kulak helpers" or "subkulaks" (подкулачник), those who sided with kulaks in their opposition to collectivisation.

A new wave of repressions, this time against "ex-kulaks", was started in 1937, as part of the Great Purge, after the NKVD Order no. 00447. Those deemed ex-kulaks had only two options: death sentence or labour camps.

When resettled to Siberia and Kazakhstan, after some time many "kulaks" gained prosperity again. This fact served as a base of repressions against some sections of NKVD that were in charge of the "labour settlements" (трудовые поселения) in 1938-1939, which permitted "kulakization" (окулачивание) of the "labour settlers" (трудопоселенцев). The fact that new settlers became more prosperous than the neighbouring kolkhozes was explained by "wrecking" and "criminal negligence".

Numbers persecuted

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.^{[citation needed]} Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521.

It is difficult to determine how many people died because of the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class". The data from the Soviet archives do not tell us exactly how many people escaped and survived and what number of deaths would have occurred if there had been no deportation. These data do not include people who were executed or died in prisons and gulags rather than dying in labour colonies. 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 thousand by Soviet news sources. A collection of estimates is maintained by Matthew White.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e}
2. ^ Mikhail Gorbachev. Memoirs. 769 pages. Publisher: Doubleday; 1st ed edition (September 1, 1996) ISBN-10: 0385480199
3. ^ Mikhail Gorbachev. Memoirs. 769 pages. Publisher: Doubleday; 1st ed edition (September 1, 1996) ISBN-10: 0385480199
4. ^ Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (2 vol., tr. 1970–74)
5. ^ Dmitri Volkogonov. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 1996, ISBN-10: 0761507183

See also

• Lenin's Hanging Order
• Enemy of the people
• Collectivisation in the USSR
• Yeoman
• Earth (1930), Ukrainian film by Alexander Dovzhenko, concerning a community of farmers and their resistance to Kulaks.

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