Dekulakization

History

After the 1927 harvest failed to raise state grain procurements, the Stalin faction framed the shortfall as a 'kulak grain strike'; in 1928-29 forced procurement followed, with fines, criminal penalties and confiscation, and in June 1929 whole villages were made collectively responsible for quotas. After Stalin's 'Great Break' declaration of 7 November 1929, the target for full collectivization of the grain regions was moved up to autumn 1930, and official figures recorded 18.1 per cent of peasant households collectivized as of 1 January 1930; actual entrants were mostly poor peasants, and coercion at local level was already being mobilized.

On 1 February 1930 a decree of the Soviet government and Central Executive Committee abolished the rights of individual households to lease land and hire labour and gave local authorities the power to confiscate property and deport. OGPU order No. 44/21 of 2 February 1930 directed the 'immediate liquidation' of Category I, and a secret instruction of 4 February 1930 envisaged deporting roughly 3-5 per cent of all peasant households, leaving each family no more than 500 roubles. The Politburo resolution set category quotas of 49,000-60,000 persons for Category I and 129,000-154,000 households for Category II; Category III had no quota, but total kulak households were capped at 3-5 per cent in the grain regions and 2-3 per cent elsewhere. These quotas were soon exceeded. Local troikas (the regional party first secretary, the soviet executive committee chairman and the regional GPU chief) coordinated the operation, special dekulakization commissions and brigades were mobilized from early February 1930, and the OGPU officer Yefim Yevdokimov played a leading role in organizing and supervising the identification and mass repression of peasants.

Overfulfilment quickly produced large totals. By October 1930, 284,000 people had been arrested under Category I, and by the end of 1930 roughly 330,000 households, more than 1.5 million people, had been stripped of their property across the three categories. Deportation proceeded in stages: in the first stage of 1930 a plan for 90,000 households by the end of April was exceeded, with more than 99,000 households (510,000 people) deported by late May, against allocations of 45,000 households for the North and 15,000 each for the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan; the second wave began in early May 1931 and lasted some five months, and an OGPU report of 30 September 1931 recorded 265,795 kulak families (1,243,860 people) deported, more than double the figure for 1930. New arrivals registered in 1932 numbered 71,000, and 268,000 more were deported in 1933, bringing deportees to remote regions in 1930-1933 to about 2.3 million. Separately from this total, a further roughly 300,000-350,000 Category I kulaks were shipped directly to the Gulag.

After Stalin's article 'Dizzy with Success' of 2 March 1930, a Politburo decision of 14 March 1930 labelled the conduct of party officials a 'left deviation', briefly suspending the collectivization campaign and punishing some lower-level officials; a decision of 13 October 1930 changed the criteria for classifying kulak households so that clergy households were no longer counted as kulaks. A Politburo decision of 20 July 1931 halted mass deportation while leaving 'individual deportation' as an exception; the Central Executive Committee decision 'On Revolutionary Legality' of 25 June 1932 stopped repression driven by 'initiative from below'; and joint instruction No. P-6028 of 8 May 1933 of the party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars ordered an end to mass deportation and violent forms of repression in the countryside. A decision of 24 May 1934 began restoring the citizenship of special settlers individually, and 15,366 people were released from special settlements in 1934.

Distinctions

On 8 November 1918 Lenin proclaimed a resolute line against the kulaks, and a decree of 11 June 1918 created the committees of the rural poor, under which 50 million hectares of kulak land were confiscated and transferred to poor and middle peasants. During the NEP, however, the shift to a food tax and the permitted leasing of land and hiring of labour made conditions different, so the 'liquidation as a class' of 1929-1932 is a distinct phase. From the Fourteenth Party Congress of December 1925 to the Sixteenth Party Conference of April 1929, the theses of 'restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks' and 'displacing capitalist elements in the countryside' were used together, and the Fifteenth Party Congress of December 1927 adopted the collectivization line while for a time still treating the kulaks as a class and keeping the laws on land leasing and hired labour.

The kulaks were an artificially constituted group from 1918 onward, stereotyped and dehumanized, and propaganda called them 'cockroaches' and 'bloodsuckers'. Official policy did not mean the physical liquidation of all kulaks either, and the Category I, II and III division existed from the outset. Of the 'class genocide' characterization raised by Courtois in 1997, Werth is sceptical of its application, citing the existence of the categories from the start, the fluidity of the group's sociological boundaries, and the fact that pariah status was not inherited by the next generation, while noting that grouping collectivization with the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine is a separate question.

The period itself is given differently in the sources: Russian-language material defines the policy as running from 1929 to 1932, while Werth describes a deportation campaign that continued through 1932-33 as the '1930-1933' campaign, and English reference material labels the infobox date '1929-1933'. The recorded period is therefore given here in both forms rather than fixed to a single closing year.

Those classified as kulaks in 1930-33 were targeted again during the Great Terror of 1937-38 under NKVD order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937. In that fifteen-month operation more than 800,000 people were arrested and sentenced and more than 400,000 executed, and former kulaks are assessed to have made up about a quarter of the victims. The decision of 7 August 1932 (the 'law of the three ears of corn') introduced the concept of socialist property and penalties for its theft, prescribing the death penalty for stealing collective farm property; this differed in purpose and timing from mass dekulakization.

Examples

Dekulakization often turned into a social cleansing of 'socially alien elements' generally. A February 1930 GPU report from the Volga region found that only 55 per cent of those dekulakized were nominally kulaks, alongside 15 per cent middle peasants, 15 per cent traders, 6 per cent priests, monks and nuns, 4 per cent rural intelligentsia such as teachers, and 5 per cent others. The government's five criteria for identifying a kulak household applied if even one was met, and 'other income not derived from labour' was dangerously vague: there are cases of deportation because a household had once hired help at the 1925-26 harvest, or because it owned two samovars. In the Central Black Earth region middle peasants and 'wasteful peasants' were repressed to meet speed targets, and in northern Sakhalin households that did not fit the kulak criteria were included on charges of 'Japanese leanings' or religious activity; a 1931 review removed five middle-peasant households from the list but kept their 'kulak element' status, so they faced further repression including confiscation.

Violence and plunder on the ground are recorded in GPU reports. The reports describe dekulakized people being driven naked through the streets and beaten, drunken carousing in their homes, people being made to dig their own graves, women being searched with their clothes removed, and valuables and money being stolen. A Smolensk GPU report records that brigades took winter clothes, underwear, shoes, cheap tea, water bottles and even stove pokers, and that they took the pillow from under a baby's head and the stew from a pot and smeared it on a broken icon; confiscated property was plundered or auctioned, with wooden houses sold for one rouble and cows for 20-30 kopecks.

The collapse of settlement conditions is also documented. In September 1930 a report from Arkhangelsk province admitted that only 7 of 1,641 planned dwellings for deportees had been built, and hundreds of thousands were left on steppe and marshland without regular food supplies or work. Deportees were deprived of civil rights and confined to designated zones (special settlements), working in effect as forced labour in GPU-controlled agricultural, industrial and mining structures; the GPU leased them out to state enterprises for a fee.

Peasants did not simply suffer passively. They buried grain or moved it to relatives, sold to private traders or increased consumption, and 'self-dekulakization' appeared as people sold property and fled to the cities before confiscation. The toll on women and children was heavy: children of kulak families were sometimes separated from their families and sent to orphanages and institutions, and women who had married kulaks or were their relatives were treated as potential enemies of the state, subject to arrest, deportation and detention and exposed to the loss of housing and property, family separation, forced labour and physical and sexual violence.