Kulak
[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.
[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.
Under dekulakization, government officials seized farms and executed 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.
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.
[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.
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).
[18] 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.
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.
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.
"[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.
"[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.
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.
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.
"[8] 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.
