“The kulak problem is now so pressing, given the exacerbated situation in the countryside, that it is immediately necessary to plan a whole host of measures to totally purge the countryside of the kulak element.”[i]

-G. Yagoda

Dekulakization

Lynne Viola

Dekulakization accompanied the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Dubbed the “liquidation of the kulak as a class” by Joseph Stalin in December 1929, the policy was enacted into legislation in January 1930 and carried out in 1930-31.[ii] Although aimed ostensibly at what the Communist Party considered to be the rural class enemy, the kulak or rural capitalist, the implementation of the policy would be both violent and arbitrary, striking all manner of peasant critics of the regime and most especially sources of traditional village leadership. The policy, in effect, decapitated the village, weakening authority structures and making the village more vulnerable to the incursions of the Communist Party.

Dekulakization consisted of the expropriation of the properties of kulak households (to be used to fund the new collective farms) and their expulsion from the village. The Politburo decree on dekulakization established three categories of kulaks.[iii] The first category consisted of supposed “counterrevolutionary kulak activists” who were subject to incarceration in concentration camps or execution. Following property expropriation, their families were subject to exile in the most remote hinterlands of the Soviet Union. The second category was to be made up of the remaining “ kulak activists,” especially the most wealthy kulaks; they and their families were also to be exiled to distant parts of the Soviet Union. The third category of kulaks, the majority, were to be resettled beyond the collective farm, but within the district’s borders. They would be moved into small settlements and used as a local work force in forestry, road construction, and the like.

The campaign to liquidate the kulak was implemented through widespread violence. Not infrequently, dekulakization cadres arrived in the dead of night, banging on doors and windows, waking terrified families from their sleep. They often began by rounding up the men and herding them into a makeshift prison in an attempt to prevent resistance. In the meantime, the families sat by helplessly as the cadres rummaged through their possessions, inventorying property for expropriation. Expropriation could easily become outright plunder as was the case in the vicinity of Pskov where dekulakization was known as “the week of the trunk” and in Kozlovskii County in the Central Black Earth Region, where a county official instructed cadres that it was “essential to dekulakize so only the ceiling beams and walls remain.”[iv]

Throughout the countryside, peasants resisted the dekulakization of their neighbors. In many instances, peasants, especially women, attempted to block the removal of kulaks from the village, turning out in force to surround the unfortunate families. One woman in Ukraine captured what was a general sentiment when she yelled at an official, “Why are you torturing people? Where are you taking them? Why must you torture the children?” In the village of Petrovka in Western Siberia, forty women, including members of the new collective farm, massed to prevent cadres from removing the kulaks and then dispersed the kulak children to their own homes. In many places, peasants offered the families clothes or food.[v]

The kulaks themselves resisted in a variety of ways, ranging from flight and the destruction of their property to family divisions and divorce. Some accepted dekulakization fatalistically. A Middle Volga peasant said, “I’m prepared. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.” Some chose suicide. In Tagil’skii county in the Urals, one kulak murdered his wife and children before burning himself to death and his house to the ground. One woman threw herself under a train rather than face the journey to the unknown. Many tried, at least, to save their children. One kulak said, “Let them shoot us here, we are not going anywhere with our children.” The peasant Shabalin from Novo-Privol’skoe village in Western Siberia said, “Exile me, but don’t take the children. I don’t want them to die.”[vi]

The result of dekulakization was a human tragedy of immense proportions. In 1930, some 337,563 peasant families were subject to some form of dekulakization. Approximately 30,000 individuals, mainly male heads of household, were executed by firing squad in 1930 and 1931. In these same years, a total of 381,026 families, or roughly two million people were deported. The majority of these families were from Ukraine (63,720), North Caucasus (38,404), Lower Volga (30,933), Central Black Earth (26,006), and Middle Volga (23,006). They were expelled from their homes and villages and exiled to the far North, the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, where they would live in special settlements and serve as forced laborers for the state’s drive to industrialize.[vii]

[i] Viola, Lynne, V.P. Danilov, N.A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, eds. The War Against the Peasantry.New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2005, pp. 218-219.

[ii] Speech of 27 Dec. 1929 at a conference of Marxist agronomists—see I. Stalin, Sochinennia, 13 vols. (M, 1946-52), vol. 12, p. 166.

[iii]Viola et al., pp. 228-234.

[iv]RGAE (RussianState Archive of the Economy), f. 7446, op. 5, d. 87, l. 2; RGAE, f. 7486, op. 37, d. 122, l. 174

[v]Berelovich,A., and V. Danilov, eds. Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VKP-OGPU-NKVD, 1918-1939. Dokumenty i materialy, 4 vols. M: 2000-?, vol. 3, book 1, p. 712.

[vi]RGAE, f. 7446, op. 5, d. 87, l. 21; I. E. Plotnikov, “Krest’ianskie volneniia i vystupleniia na Urale v kontse 20-k nachale 30-kh godov,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 2 (1998).

[vii]Danilov, V.P., R.T. Manning, and L. Viola, eds. Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927-1939, 5 vols. (M: 1999-2006), vol. 2, pp.415, 746, 809-10; GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 9479, op. 1, d. 89, l. 205; V.V. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923-1953 gg.,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 2 (1992), pp. 28-9.