Kulak

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The kulaks (Russian: кулак, Ukrainian: куркуль) were prosperous Russian peasants who usually owned a large farm and several horses or cattle, and could hire labor and even lease land. The kulaks were leading figures in the peasant villages prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The term kulak was used interchangeably with as "enemy of the people."

Vladimir Lenin ordered execution of kulaks to terrorize village and rural populations into submission under the Soviet yole. An order dated Novermeber 8, 1918 illustrates the terrorist tactics used by the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Revolution:

Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak administrative districts must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle "with the kulaks." We need to set an example.

  1. ) You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers.
  2. ) Publish their names.
  3. ) Take away all of their grain.
  4. ) Execute the hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.

This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this.

Yours, Lenin [1]

P.S. Use your toughest people for this.

When Joseph Stalin rose to power, kulaks resisted some of his measures of collectivization. Stalin responded with a brutality of horrific proportions, known as "Dekulakization". On 27 December, 1929 he announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as class". The purpose of this was to combat suppossed "counter revolutionaries", but in reality it served to enable the advance of collectivization. The kulaks and their families had all of their property confiscated by the state. Stalin then either executed, put in labor camps, or deported them to Siberia or central Asia. It is unclear how many died to to the Soviet policies of dekulakization and collectivization, but most estimates place the death toll around 15 million. Dekulakization was also a factor in the man-made famine (Holodomor) in Soviet controlled Ukraine, which claimed around 7 million lives. In 1934, the Communist Party justified their actions with the statement "Not one of them [Kulaks] was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything".

"KULAK" was the code name given by the KGB in Venona cables to U.S. Republican party nominee Thomas Dewey who ran against incumbant Democratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President in 1944. [2]

As a continuing effect of this, in the 1980s the Soviet Union had to buy much grain from the United States, and Russian agriculture remains weak to this day.

References

  1. Lenin's Hanging Order, English translation.
  2. Venona 1433 - 1435 New York to Moscow, 10 October 1944, p.1 p.2p.3