Kulak
쿨라크
A peasant who had grown richer than his neighbours through hired labour, moneylending or renting out equipment. Originally a term for exploitative rich farmers, under full collectivization it became a label pinned on any peasant resisting the kolkhoz, and 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class' deported or executed hundreds of thousands of households.
In depth
Formation of the category
Kulak began as peasant vernacular for the man who held his neighbours through moneylending, grain dealing, and the renting out of equipment. As rural stratification advanced after the Stolypin reforms, the word settled into a name for the economic upper layer of the village.
In Bolshevik policy language the kulak was defined as the top of a threefold division into poor, middle, and rich peasants. The difficulty lay in identification. Use of hired labour, leasing of land or equipment, and trading activity were offered as indicators, but in the rural conditions of the 1920s these were matters of degree rather than a clear boundary. The proportion of households the statistical agencies counted as kulak varied widely with the method of survey.
Liquidation as a class
In December 1929 Stalin formalized the line of liquidating the kulaks as a class, and the Politburo decision of 30 January 1930 with the OGPU order No. 44/21 issued under it set out how. Kulaks were sorted into three categories: the first to be arrested as counter-revolutionary activists and sent to camps or shot, the second deported to remote regions, and the third resettled on inferior land within their own district.
The sorting was done against regional quotas. To fill the number assigned to a village, middle peasants and then poor peasants who opposed collectivization were included, and the derived label podkulachnik, meaning kulak henchman, licensed the expansion. At this point kulak had ceased to be an economic category and become a political brand.
Scale and aftermath
Figures established since the archives opened put deportations classed as special settlers at roughly 1.9 million people across 1930 and 1931, with a larger cumulative total by 1933. The destinations were the northern Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the far north. Transport took place before settlements were prepared, and mortality in the first two years was high.
In the mid-1930s the Soviet authorities declared the liquidation of the kulaks complete. Residence and employment restrictions on deportees and their children lasted much longer, and during the mass operations of the Great Purge the former kulak reappeared as one of the principal target categories named in NKVD order No. 00447.