Dekulakization

Dekulakization (Russian: раскулачивание, raskulachivanie; Ukrainian: розкуркулення, rozkurkulennia) was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks (prosperous peasants) and their families in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government portrayed kulaks as class enemies of the USSR.

Dekulakization
Part of Collectivization in the Soviet Union
A parade under the banners "We will liquidate the kulaks as a class" and "All to the struggle against the wreckers of agriculture".
Location	Soviet Union
Date	1929–1933
Attack type	Classicide,[1] mass murder, deportation, starvation
Deaths	Estimates from 530,000–600,000[2] to 5,000,000[3]
Perpetrators	Secret police of the Soviet Union

More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931.[4][5][6] The campaign had the stated purpose of fighting counter-revolution and of building socialism in the countryside. This policy, carried out simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union, effectively brought all agriculture and all the laborers in Soviet Russia under state control.

Hunger, disease, and mass executions during dekulakization led to at least 530,000 to 600,000 deaths from 1929 to 1933,[7] though higher estimates also exist, Soviet era expert Robert Conquest estimating in 1986 that 5 million people may have died.[8] The results soon became known outside the Soviet Union.

Under Stalin

Joseph Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929.[4] Stalin had said: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes."[9] The Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party formalized the decision in a resolution titled "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization" on 30 January 1930. All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]

1. Those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police
2. Those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property
3. Those to be evicted from their houses and used in labor colonies within their own districts

An OGPU secret-police functionary, Yefim Yevdokimov (1891–1939), played a major role in organizing and supervising the round-up of peasants and the mass executions.

Classicide of the Kulaks

Soviet propaganda poster stating Oust kulaks from kolkhozes! (1920)

Kick kulaks from kolkhozes (1930)

In February 1928, the "Pravda" newspaper for the first time published materials that claimed to expose the kulaks: they described widespread domination by the rich peasantry in the countryside and invasion by kulaks of communist party cells.[10] Expropriation of grain stocks from kulaks and middle class peasants was called a "temporary emergency measure". Later, temporary emergency measures turned into a policy of "eliminating the kulaks as a class".[10]

The party's appeal to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class had been formulated by Stalin:[11]

"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.). That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. Without it, talk about ousting the kulaks as a class is empty prattle, acceptable and profitable only to the Right deviators."

In 1928, the right opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still trying to support the prosperous peasantry and soften the struggle against the kulaks. In particular, Alexei Rykov, criticizing the policy of dekulakization and "methods of war communism," declared that an attack on the kulaks should be carried out, but not by methods of so-called dekulakization. He argued against taking action against individual farming in the village, the productivity of which was two times lower than in European countries. He believed that the most important task of the party was the development of the individual farming of peasants with the help of the government.[12]

The requisition of grains from wealthy peasants (kulaks) during the forced collectivization in Timashyovsky District, Kuban Soviet Union. 1933

Increasingly, the government noticed an open and resolute protest among the poor against the well-to-do middle peasants.[13]

The growing discontent of the poor peasants was reinforced by the famine in the countryside. The Bolsheviks preferred to blame the "rural counterrevolution" of the kulaks, intending to aggravate the attitude of the people towards the party: "We must repulse the kulak ideology coming in the letters from the village. The main advantage of the kulak is bread embarrassments." Red Army peasants sent letters supporting anti-kulak ideology: "The kulaks are the furious enemies of socialism. We must destroy them, don't take them to the kolkhoz, you must take away their property, their inventory." The letter of the Red Army soldier of the 28th Artillery Regiment became widely known: "The last bread is taken away, the Red Army family is not considered. Although you are my dad, I do not believe you. I'm glad that you had a good lesson. Sell bread, carry surplus – this is my last word."[14][15]

"Liquidation of kulaks as class"

The liquidation of kulaks as class was a Soviet policy enforced in 1930-31 for forced uncompensated alienation of property (expropriation) from portion of peasantry and isolation of victims from such actions by way of their forceful deportation from their place of residence as well as physical liquidation.[16]

See also

• Red Terror
• Decossackization
• Committees of Poor Peasants
• Population transfer in the Soviet Union
• Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
• Collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Holodomor
• Classicide
• Mass killings of landlords under Mao Zedong
• Land reform in North Vietnam
• Cambodian genocide
• Mass killings under communist regimes

Citations

1. Jacques Semelin, Stanley (INT) Hoffman. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York, New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 2007. p. 37.
2. Hildermeier, Die Sowjetunion, p. 38 f.
3. Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
4. Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
5. Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
6. Lynne Viola The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements Oxford University Press 2007, hardback, 320 pages ISBN 978-0-19-518769-4 ISBN 0195187695
7. Hildermeier, Die Sowjetunion, p. 38 f.
8. Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
9. Robert Service: Stalin, a biography, page 266.
10. Л. Д. Троцкий «Материалы о революции. Преданная революция. Что такое СССР и куда он идет»
11. И. В. Сталин «К вопросу о ликвидации кулачества как класса»
12. Н. В. Валентинов, Ю. Г. Фельштинский «Наследники Ленина»
13. РГВА, ф. 4, оп. 1, д. 107, л. 215. Цит. по: Чуркин В. Ф. Самоидентификация крестьянства на переломном этапе своей истории. // История государства и права, 2006, N 7
14. В. Ф. Чуркин, кандидат исторических наук. «Самоидентификация крестьянства на переломном этапе своей истории» // «История государства и права», 2006, N 7)
15. Красный воин (МВО). 1930. 13 февраля, 14 мая.
16. Kulchytskyi, S. Liquidation of kulaks as class (ЛІКВІДАЦІЯ КУРКУЛЬСТВА ЯК КЛАСУ). Encyclopedia of History of Ukraine. 2009

Further reading

• Manfred Hildermeier: Die Sowjetunion 1917–1991. (Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte, Bd. 31), Oldenbourg, 2. Aufl., München 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58327-4.
• Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987)
• Figes, Orlando. The whisperers: private life in Stalin's Russia (Macmillan, 2007). detailed histories of actual Kulak families.
• Kaznelson, Michael. "Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak children and dekulakisation." Europe-Asia Studies 59.7 (2007): 1163-1177.
• Lewin, Moshe. "Who was the Soviet kulak?." Europe‐Asia Studies 18.2 (1966): 189-212.
• Viola, Lynne. "The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter 1929–1930: A Reevaluation of the Legislation." Slavic Review 45.3 (1986): 503-524.
• Viola, Lynne. "The Peasants’ Kulak: Social Identities and Moral Economy in the Soviet Countryside in the 1920s." Canadian Slavonic Papers 42.4 (2000): 431-460.