Kulots Russia
Trial or deported to prison camps in remote areas of Russia. Stalin also imposed the Soviet system of land management known as collectivization. Among those farmers, were a class of people called Kulaks by the Communists. Had employed farm workers. Stalin believed any future insurrection would. From 'Monster: A Portrait of Stalin in Blood' (5 part mini-series) 1992Executive producer: Alexander IvankinInternational producer: Maya Toidze.
[Maggie Burke]
From the Russian word meaning “fist”, the term kulak was used in Soviet-era Russia to designate certain elements of the peasant population as “enemies of the state.” In the strictest official terms, a kulak was defined as:
a peasant farmer having one or more of the following characteristics: (1) employment of two agricultural laborers, one of them hired for not less than one half of the year; (2) possession of not less than three head of draft cattle, in some regions not less than four, and the cultivation of more than 10, 12, 14 or 16 desiatins [1 desiatin = 2.7 acres], depending on the region; (3) ownership of a small processing plant with at least one hired laborer, or even without one in case there is a hired laborer in some other branch of the farm; (4) ownership of some commercial enterprise, even without the assistance of a hired man; (5) individual ownership or large share ownership of modern agricultural machinery. (Larin, cited Ladejinsky, 16)
The term kulak was also used in some cases to refer to a village usurer (Mace, 488), or someone who “engaged in commercial activities… or [obtained] other income not from work – specifically including the priesthood,” and the above definition was continually reshaped by local and state leaders to suit their needs (Conquest 100). Through these ever-changing definitions, kulaks were identified not only with excessive affluence but also with parasitism and the Soviet war on religion. As time went on, the term kulak was used broadly to indicate any peasant who was either wealthier than others in his village or resisted the process of societal transformation. A dichotomous relationship was established in Soviet thought regarding types of peasants: the kulaks who were uncooperative and resisted collectivization and the poorer, ‘good-hearted’ and ‘civic-minded peasants’ whom they had oppressed. Calls were made for heavy taxation of the kulaks to bring them down to the level of the other villagers and to punish them for their greed and selfishness (Chamberlin, 480-481).
Dekulakization
See also Deportations
Because the term kulak came to be defined so broadly, it was a useful rhetorical and political tool in the transition to collective farming. In 1929, Josef Stalin issued a
statement that kulaks were not fit to be included in the new collective farms, and a subcommittee on the kulak question was established to determine the best strategy for their elimination. The final decision included a range of methods for dealing with different types of kulaks depending on their recalcitrance, ranging from summary execution to exile and imprisonment to rehabilitation into the collective farm system (Conquest 114-115). In addition to those who had already been considered kulaks, all those who objected to the initial push for collectivization were labeled as kulaks and subjected to deportation or execution (Conquest 4). The purpose of the program of dekulakization was to eliminate the “kulak class” from Soviet society (Fitzpatrick, 757). Although deportation began as early as 1929 in Ukraine, dekulakization in its earliest form was a system of heavy taxation and fines designed to run kulaks into the ground financially. Accounts from various regions report so-called kulaks being required to contribute “thirty times as much tax per head” or being “obliged to deliver corn at the 40% rate,” with failure to comply punishable by large fines or dispossession (Conquest 101).
Kulaks who were deported ended up in the northernmost parts of Russia – at least that was their intended destination. In practice, many of them did not make it all the way there but were instead left to die of starvation near train stations and in transit prisons. Those who reached their final destination found themselves in forced labor camps called settlements – a part of the so-called gulag archipelago, but generally separate from the camps housing criminals or political prisoners – working in mines or on large-scale building projects such as digging canals or harbors (Conquest 138-141). What set these camps apart from the rest of the gulag was that in many cases the entire kulak family was deported together. Many children who were raised in the settlements survived to see the dissolution of the camp system after Stalin’s death, although few of them moved back to their native homelands (Kaznelson 1164-1165, 1173-1175). Thus, the system of dekulakization contributed in large part to the massive ethnic and socio-cultural reorganization of the early Soviet Union.
Collectivization
See also Collectivization
Following collectivization, scapegoats on failing collective farms were accused of hiding grain from the state and labeled kulaks. In some cases these accusations were true, as collective farming resulted in overly ambitious grain quotas which, after the state took its share, left the farmers with little or nothing to feed themselves. Cases like Pavlik Morozov, a young pioneer boy from Belarus who denounced his family as kulaks and class enemies for hiding grain from the state and was later killed (allegedly by his own family members) and became a saint-like figure in Soviet national mythology (Druzhnikov, vii), reveal both the impact of collectivization on the hungry peasants and the effectiveness of anti-kulak rhetoric.
Works Cited
- William Henry Chamberlin, “The Russian Peasant Sphinx,” Foreign Affairs 7, no. 3 (1929): 477-487. Accessed 14 February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20028708.
- Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
- Yuri Druzhnikov, Informer 001 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993): 745-770. Accessed 14 February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124540.
- Michael Kaznelson, “Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak Children and Dekulakization,” Europe-Asia Studies 59, no. 7 (2007): 1163-1177.
- W. Ladejinsky, “Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union I,” Political Science Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1934): 1-43. Accessed 14 February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2143326.
- James E. Mace, “The Komitety Nezamozhnykh Selyan and the Structure of Soviet Rule in the Ukrainian Countryside, 1920-1933,” Soviet Studies 35, no. 4 (1983): 487-503. Accessed 14 February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/151256.
MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms
Kulak
Meaning 'Fist' in Russian. Name for the landlords of rural Russia.
Origin:Land tenure in Feudal Russia had been arranged where land was split into long narrow strips; the serfs tended two strips side by side; one for the landlord, the other for themselves.
After serfdom was abolished in 1861, the land the serfs had once cultivated for themselves was now owned by the peasant commune, formed from those peasants who were once serfs to a common landlord. The landlords retained the lands that were not used for maintaining the serfs (eg. the majority of their former lands) – still in strips next to the communal land. The landlords also kept all their forested and pastoral lands. Thus, serfs had once been able to graze their animals (commonly a cow and horse) on pastoral land, now they could not. The newly 'emancipated' peasants were also stranded from the most prized commodity of Russia throughout most of the year – firewood.
From these conditions was born the Kulak, who imposed on the peasantry a tax to use their pastoral lands. The peasant communes responded by lying fallow some of their own land and turning it into pasture. Their remained, however, strips of the landlord's land running throughout their community, with which the kulak established a system of tolls for each animal that crossed over his land. On the matter of wood, peasants had little choice but to work the kulak's land in return for a payment that would allow them to cut timber from the kulak's forest.
This relationship throughout Russia gave birth to the first revolutionary parties in Russia.
Kulaks in WWI:Throughout the early twentieth century kulaks bought communal land where they could, but it was difficult to do so; the communes refused to sell their land despite threats and pressure. During World War I, kulaks came into a new era.
Kulaks bribed local officials to prevent conscription into the army, and lied in wait for the field of opportunity to soon open up. While hundreds of thousands of peasants were sent to the slaughter on the front, kulaks grabbed up the communal land in a free-for-all.
By 1917, the success of kulaks cannot be seen more clearly than in the amount of land they owned: over nine-tenths of Russia's arable land.
Kulots Russia
The most valuable commodity throughout the war was grain, and the kulaks understood this with absolute clarity: food prices climbed higher than any other commodity during the war. In 1916, food prices accelerated three times higher than wages, despite bumper harvests in both 1915 and 1916. The price of grain in 1916, already at two and a half rubles per pud, was anticipated to raise up to twenty five rubles per pud. Hoping to raise prices, the kulaks hoarded their food surplus as their lands continually increased.
Throughout 1916, the average urban labourer ate between 200 and 300 grams of food a day. In 1917, the urban populations of Russia were allowed to buy only one pound of bread per adult, per day. Workers sometimes went days without food.
As a result of the Soviet Land Decree of October 26, 1917, when the peasants took back their land from the kulaks, food slowly came back into the cities again. Though the Kulaks were overwhelmed by the peasants at home and those returning from the front, many responded later in the year, during the coming Civil War.[...]
The kulaks were considered enemies of the working class and were treated as such by the Soviets. Incidents of kulak reprisals against communists were isolated and infrequent relative to the scale and scope of the “dekulakization” efforts of the Soviet government.
The issue of how to treat the kulaks as a class was a political matter that received much attention, particularly during the early years of the USSR and throughout the Stalin era. In his 1919 “Reply to a Peasant’s Question,” Lenin identified the kulaks as:
“...rich peasants who exploit the labour of others, either hiring them for work, or lending money at interest, and so forth. This group supports the landowners and capitalists, the enemies of the Soviet power.”
(V.I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 36, pp. 500-503.)
Although Lenin noted that the kulaks were antagonistic to the Soviet working class, no decisive action was taken against the kulaks during Lenin’s lifetime, partly because of widespread economic problems throughout the developing Soviet Union. The kulaks coexisted with cooperatives and collective farms until Stalin introduced forced collectivization in 1927 and ultimately smashed the kulaks as a class.
Both Lenin and Stalin were explicit in their directives on the liquidation of the kulaks. In Stalin’s 1929 letter “Concerning Policy of Liquidating Kulaks as a Class,” he expressed in no uncertain terms how the Soviet government would approach the “kulak question”:
“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 (free use of land, instruments of production, land-renting, right to hire labour, etc.).”
(J. V. Stalin Works, Vol. 12 pp. 184-189.)
Culottes Russia
Kulturkampf
Culottes Translation To Russian
A system of reforms implemented in the 1870s by Bismark's government in order to create a secular culture. In the 1880s Bismark repealed the majority of these reforms.
Oregon Russian Community
Index of the Letter K Encyclopedia of Marxism