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Kulak (/ˈkuːlæk/KOO-lak; Russian:кула́к,romanized:kulák,IPA:[kʊˈɫak]ⓘ; plural: кулаки́,kulakí, 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), alsokurkul (Ukrainian:куркуль) orgolchomag (Azerbaijani:qolçomaq, plural:qolçomaqlar), was the term which was used to describepeasants who owned over 3 ha (8 acres) of land towards the end of theRussian Empire. In the earlySoviet Union, particularly inSoviet Russia andAzerbaijan,kulak referred toproperty ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of theBolshevik Revolution.[1] InUkraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term ofpodkulachnik (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 theabolition of serfdom in 1861 and during theStolypin reform of 1906 to 1914, which aimed to reduce radicalism amongst the peasantry and produce profit-minded, politically conservative farmers. During theRussian Revolution,kulak was used to chastise peasants who withheld grain from theBolsheviks.[3] According toMarxist–Leninist political theories of the early 20th century, the kulaks were consideredclass 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 thefirst five-year plan,Joseph Stalin's all-out campaign to take land ownership and organisation away from thekulaks 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 classifiedkulaks according to criteria such as the use of hired labour.[citation needed] Underdekulakization, government officials seized farms and executed manykulaks,[4][9]forcibly transferred others tolabor camps, and drove many others to migrate to the cities following the loss of their property to the collectives.[10]
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:
In addition, they had a category ofbatrak, landless seasonal agricultural workers for hire.[4]
The term "Podkulachnik"
The term Podkulachnik or "sub‐kulak” was used during the Stalinist period to designate persons close tokulaks or those who urged others not to comply with procurement quotas. Expressions of sympathy[clarification needed] for the dispossessedkulaks were branded as “sub‐kulak" sentiment.[11]
Various tsarist officials and their opposition had expressed negative views ofkulaks as early as the 19th century. JudgeAnatoly Koni comparedkulaks to profiteers, arguing that they are not tied to the land by labor or personal memories, but by exploiting its resources and people.[12] These sentiments are echoed in the writings of people such asAlexey Yermolov,[13]Alexander Engelhardt,[14] andRoman Zimmerman [ru].[15]
In his 1899 workSmall public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants, governor ofPenza Ivan Koshko noted that thekulaks 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."[16] 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.[17] A few years later, after the turn of the century, Prime MinisterPyotr Stolypin would argue that becoming akulak was the only way out of poverty for many, although at the expense of fellow peasants.[18]
TheStolypin reform also aided in the development of thekulak class 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.[19]
Both peasants and Soviet officials were uncertain as to who constituted akulak and the legal criteria shifted around regularly in the years following theRussian Revolution of 1917.[20] TheBolsheviks considered onlybatraks andbednyaks to be of a productive economic class;serednyaks were considered unreliable, hesitating allies, andkulaks were 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.[21] Conquest argues that the definition of akulak 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."[22]
There were other measures that indicated thekulaks as not being especially prosperous. They often used the term to label anyone who had more property than was considered "normal," and personal rivalries also played a part in the classification of people as enemies.[citation needed] Officials arbitrarily applied the definition and abused their power.[23] 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 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 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 Lenin sent 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."[24] Lenin had justified the state response tokulak revolts due to the 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of theWhite Terror. He summarised his view that either the "kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatorykulak minority [...] There can be no middle course".[25]
The average value of the goods which were confiscated from thekulaks during 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 Union in the early 1930s, people who were identified askulaks were 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][26][27]
In May 1929, theSovnarkom issued a decree which formalised the notion of 'kulak household' (кулацкое хозяйство), according to which any of the following criteria defined a person as akulak:[4][28][20]
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, andkrais were granted the right to add other criteria to the list so other people could be classified askulaks, depending on local conditions.[4]
In 1932 and 1933, the label "kulak" was extended to include anyone who offered passive or active resistance to grain procurements ("kulak sabotage") in addition to landowners and those employing hired labor, as well as the so-called "hard‐deliverers" (peasants subject to fixed grain‐delivery quotas) and "experts" (those recruited to oversee or report on procurement).[citation needed]
In July 1929, official Soviet policy continued to state that thekulaks should 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 ofkolkhozes andsovkhozes."[29] 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."[30] 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 thekulaks as a class" constituted the main part of Stalin'ssocial 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.[31]
On 30 January 1930, thePolitburo approved the dissolving of thekulaks as a class. Three categories ofkulaks were distinguished:kulaks who were supposed to be sent to theGulags,kulaks who were supposed to be relocated to distant provinces, such as the northUrals andKazakhstan, andkulaks who were supposed to be sent to other areas within their home provinces.[32] 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.[33] In response to the widespread slaughter, the Sovnarkom issued decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (хищнический убой скота).[34] Stalin ordered severe measures to endkulak 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 thekulaks as a class."[35]
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[36] and peasants who did not show signs of starvation were especially suspected of hiding food.[37] 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 ... ."[38]
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 '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 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]
Stalin issued an order for thekulaks "to be liquidated as a class";[39] according toRoman Serbyn, this was the main cause of theSoviet famine of 1932–1933 and was agenocide,[40] while other scholars disagree and propose more than one cause.[41][42][43] 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,[44] 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 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 ofkulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521[citation needed]. Formerkulaks and their families made up the majority of the victims of theGreat Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 people executed.[45]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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