And yes, Virginia, yes there absolutely are references to kulaks: The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).
|
|
The so-called kulaks were arrested and exiled, and sometimes shot.
|
|
At this point, you might be wondering: Are there references to kulaks?
|
|
Lenin liquidated Russia's Tsarist aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the affluent peasants known as kulaks.
|
|
Relatively wealthy farmers, known as kulaks, were among the groups targeted by the Soviets in the 1930s.
|
|
In fact, Jones specifies what he'll be doing while we are all salivating over Lenin: "Me, I will be remembering the kulaks."
|
|
For example, it compares Lenin's demonization of kulaks, or yeoman farmers, to Ms. Warren's critiques of the behavior of some large corporations.
|
|
The U.K. is now in election mode, with Parliament having been dissolved and the U.K. press running banner headlines about, um, kulaks.
|
|
It was one thing to unleash the power of the state against kulaks, the wealthy peasants who were key villains in Soviet mythology.
|
|
Alina presumed that the oldest were dispossessed as "kulaks" — peasants deemed affluent, making them potentially disloyal — and that their children fled to the cities.
|
|
Rather than a violent seizure of power and the liquidation of the kulaks, they want progressive taxation and a narrower gap between rich and poor.
|
|
Stalin expropriated, expelled or exterminated many of the most prosperous and sophisticated farmers (the "kulaks"), requisitioned grain at low prices and tried to nationalise draught-animals.
|
|
And here: The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).
|
|
"The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren)," the report says.
|
|
"The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren)," the report argues.
|
|
Aiming to feed a growing urban work force and increase exports, Stalin's henchmen forced peasants onto collective farms and eliminated relatively well-off peasants known as kulaks.
|
|
Stalin introduced collectivization during the late 1920s in a plan to free Russian peasants from centuries of forced labor as serfs working under wealthy landowners and later, kulaks.
|
|
This was only a few years after the systematic massacres of the "kulaks," who were relatively wealthy peasants of Russia, more than a decade after Russian elites such as the Tsar were killed.
|
|
It was fueled by the forced labor of prisoners and "kulaks," wealthier peasants who had been expropriated and labeled class traitors, who like all workers in the Soviet Union, were pressured to meet exaggerated quotas.
|
|
Both were homicidal paranoiacs, determined to deport, enslave and exterminate entire categories of human beings: in Stalin's case, the kulaks during the collectivization campaign; in Hitler's, not just Jews but Slavs, Romani and numerous others.
|
|
"They pretend that their hatred is directed only at certain billionaires — and they point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks," Johnson wrote, according to Reuters.
|
|
Since 1945, the terminology was unified, and exiled kulaks were documented as "special resettlers – kulaks".
|
|
In 1929, at the beginning of his dictatorship, Joseph Stalin demanded the "liquidation of kulaks as a class". The Kulaks were peasants who were deemed "wealthy" by Stalin in 1929. The idea for dekulakization first arose in 1918 from Vladimir Lenin, who claimed that the Kulaks were "freeloaders".А.Арутюнов «Досье Ленина без ретуши. Документы. Факты. Свидетельства.», Москва: Вече, 1999 The oppression of kulaks didn't end until 1932, throughout this time Kulaks were being evicted from their homes, having their land confiscated, shot, imprisoned, deported, or being sent to local work camps.
|
|
Soviet propaganda poster stating Oust kulaks from kolkhozes! 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.Л. Д. Троцкий «Материалы о революции. Преданная революция. Что такое СССР и куда он идет» Expropriation of grain stocks from kulaks and middle class peasants was called a "temporary emergency measure".
|
|
Official propaganda blamed "Western imperialists", "saboteurs" and kulaks for these problems.
|
|
Later, temporary emergency measures turned into a policy of "eliminating the kulaks as a class". The party's appeal to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class had been formulated by Stalin:И. В. Сталин «К вопросу о ликвидации кулачества как класса» In 1928 the right opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still trying to support the prosperous peasantry and to soften the struggle against the kulaks.
|
|
At the same time, individual farming and khutirs were liquidated through class discrimination identifying such elements as kulaks. In the Soviet propaganda kulaks were portrayed as counterrevolutionaries and organizers of anti-Soviet protests and terrorist acts. In Ukraine the Turkic name "korkulu" was adopted, which meant "dangerous".
|
|
Nastya's working class rhetoric, which she first used in order to fit in, is now violent in nature. She writes, "Liquidate the kulaks as a class. … Greetings to the collective farm, but not the kulaks." The activist rounds up all of the peasants but is terrified to make a mistake.
|
|
Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. Data from the Soviet archives indicates 2.4 million Kulaks were deported from 1930–34. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521.
|
|
The kulaks did not support mass collectivization, as their land was being taken from them as well as their animals. At the end of 1929 the Soviets asserted themselves to forming collectivized peasant agriculture, but the “Kulaks” had to be “liquidated as a class,” because of their resistance to fixed agricultural prices. Resulting from this, the party behavior became uncontrolled and manic when the party began to requisition food from the countryside. Kulaks were executed, exiled or deported, based on their level of resistance to collectivization.
|
|
Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. It is estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937, during the deportation many people died, but the full number is not known.
|
|
The imposition of high compulsory quotas, however, forced peasants to collectivise in order to increase efficiency and facilitate mechanisation. Discriminatory policies were employed to bring about the ruin of recalcitrant kulaks (wealthy peasants). Collectivisation was near completion by 1960. 16% of all farmland (obtained from collaborators and kulaks) had been turned into state-run farms.
|
|
The official goal of "kulak liquidation" came without precise instructions, and encouraged local leaders to take radical action. The campaign to "liquidate the kulaks as a class" constituted the main part of Stalin's social-engineering policies in the early 1930s. On 30 January 1930, the Politburo approved the dissolving of kulaks as a class. Three categories of kulaks were distinguished: the first to be sent to the Gulags; the second to be relocated to distant provinces, such as the north Urals and Kazakhstan; and the third to other areas within their province.
|
|
The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly > suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the > last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An > example must be demonstrated. #Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the > people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, filthy rich men, > bloodsuckers.
|
|
Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p234 During the Stalinist era, all opposition leaders were routinely described as traitors and agents of foreign, imperialist powers.Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge p93 The Five Year Plan intensified the class struggle with many attacks on kulaks, and when it was found that many peasant opponents were not rich enough to qualify, they were declared "sub-kulaks."Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia, from Nicholas II to Putin p 179-80 "Kulaks and other class-alien enemies" were often cited as the reason for failures on collective farms.Lewis Stegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism As A Way Of Life, p54 Throughout the First and Second Five Year plans, kulaks, wreckers, saboteurs and nationalists were attacked, leading up to the Great Terror.
|
|
In many cases, peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms, even though the government only wanted the grain. Kulaks, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Russian Far North (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak". The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class—formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929—meant some executions, and even more deportation to special settlements and, sometimes, to forced labor camps.
|
|
Kulaks were a group of relatively affluent farmers and had gone by this class system term in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. They were the most numerous group deported by the Soviet Union. Resettlement of people officially designated as kulaks continued until early 1950, including several major waves. Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination.
|
|
In early 1928 Stalin travelled to Novosibirsk, where he alleged that kulaks were hoarding their grain and ordered that the kulaks be arrested and their grain confiscated, with Stalin bringing much of the area's grain back to Moscow with him in February. At his command, grain procurement squads surfaced across Western Siberia and the Urals, with violence breaking out between these squads and the peasantry. Stalin announced that both kulaks and the "middle peasants" must be coerced into releasing their harvest. Bukharin and several other Central Committee members were angry that they had not been consulted about this measure, which they deemed rash.
|
|
Many kulaks, along with their families, were deported from the Ukrainian SSR. According to declassified data, around 300,000 peasants in Ukraine were affected by these policies in 1930–1931. Ukrainians composed 15% of the total 1.8 million kulaks relocated Soviet-wide.Davies and Wheatcroft, p.490 Beginning in summer 1931, all further deportations were recommended to be administered only to individuals.
|
|
Stalin stated "We must smash the Kulaks, eliminate them as a class." Some of the land-owning peasants fought back and began to sabotage agricultural machines. The local Kulaks were more militant and committed violent acts against Soviet officials. Most Ukrainians wanted to keep their private land, especially since compared to many other parts of Russia their land was agriculturally rich and fertile.
|
|
Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class. The methods Stalin used to eliminate the kulaks were dispossession, deportation, and execution. The term "Ural-Siberian Method" was coined by Stalin, the rest of the population referred to it as the "new method".
|
|
In July 1949, a further 35,000 were deported from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, accused of being kulaks or collaborating with the wartime Romanian administration.
|
|
Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 arrested and 376,202 executed.
|
|
227-243, see p. 230-231 Some of the peasants and "weak elements" were arrested and deported "to the north". Many arrested kulaks and "well-to-do" farmers resettled their families to the Urals and Central Asia.Wheatcroft and Davies The term kulak was ultimately applied to anybody resisting collectivization as many of the so-called kulaks were no more well-off than other peasants.
|
|
The further course of the rebellion is not well documented, but the government eventually crushed the uprising, and went on to denounce the rebels as rich Kulaks and bandits.
|
|
Podkulachnik (, literally: "Person under the kulaks") was a political label used in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s to brand people considered traitors to the Soviet Government.
|
|
Stalin emphasized in 1929 a campaign demonizing kulaks as a plague on society. Kulak property was taken and they were deported by cattle train to areas of frozen tundra.
|
|
A second forced "voluntary" collectivization campaign was initiated in the winter–summer of 1931 with significant assistance of the so-called "tug-brigades" composed from kolkhoz udarniks. Many "kulaks" along with families were deported from Ukraine. According to declassified data, around 300,000 peasants in Ukraine out of a population of about 30 million were subject to these policies in 1930–31. Ukrainians composed 15% of the total 1.8 million 'kulaks' relocated Soviet- wide.
|
|
Dekulakization (, raskulachivanie; , rozkurkulennia) was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and 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. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931.Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
|
|
Capitalism penetrated into the countryside. Landowners gradually turned into capitalist ones. A wealthy elite — the kulaks — quickly grew up among the peasants. Englishman John Hughes in 1869-1872 built in with.
|
|
The film, about a young teacher sent to work in Siberia, is in a realist mode and addresses three political topics then current: education, technology, and the elimination of the kulaks.
|
|
In response to the widespread slaughter, the Sovnarkom issued decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" (). Stalin ordered severe measures to end kulak resistance. In 1930, he declared: :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.… That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.
|
|
From 1925 to 1928, Kaganovich was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR. He was given the task of "ukrainizatsiya" – meaning at that time the building up of Ukrainian communist popular cadres. He also had the duty of implementing collectivization and the policy of economic suppression of the kulaks (wealthier peasants). He opposed the more moderate policy of Nikolai Bukharin, who argued in favor of the "peaceful integration of kulaks into socialism".
|
|
The fate of the remaining 486,370 cannot be verified. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932–1940 was 389,521.
|
|
Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. . By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (kulaks) were forced off their land.
|
|
Their share steadily fell as urbanisation increased, to about a quarter in the 1960s and under 20% in the 1980s. Starting in the 1950s, UTM activists were mobilised to help with collectivisation, participating in propaganda actions and unmasking class enemies at the party's behest. At UTM meetings, members were asked to convince their relatives and friends to give over their land to collectives, to denounce kulaks and those who opposed collectivisation, and even to speak out against marriages between kulaks and poor peasant girls.
|
|
The Five Year Plans also saw a cultural change in the decline of the Kulak population within the Soviet Union. Members of Agitprop brigands attempted to use the push towards industrialization to isolate peasants from religion and away from the formerly influential Kulak population with performances in which they would deem that issues faced by peasant populations were the faults of the Kulaks. From 1929 through 1931, 3.5 million Kulaks were dispossessed by the Soviet Union and left with no choice but relocation to cities.
|
|
The right tendency was identified with the supporters of Nikolai Bukharin and Rykov. It was asserted that they represented the influence of the peasantry and the danger of capitalist restoration. Their policy was closely identified with the New Economic Policy (NEP), with former left communist Bukharin slowly moving to the right of the Bolshevik Party and becoming a strong supporter of the NEP starting in 1921. Right Opposition policies encouraging kulaks and NEPmen to "get rich" were seen by Right Opposition supporters as encouraging kulaks and NEPmen to "grow into" socialism.
|
|
Not only was collectivization meant to fund industrialization, but it was also a way for the Bolsheviks to systematically attack the Kulaks and peasants in general. Stalin was incredibly suspicious of the peasants, he viewed them as a major threat to socialism. Stalin's use of the collectivization process served to not only address the grain shortages, but his greater concern over the peasants' willingness to conform to the collective farm system and state mandated grain acquisitions. He viewed this as an opportunity to eliminate Kulaks as a class by means of collectivization.
|
|
Joseph Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929. 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."Robert Service: Stalin, a biography, page 266. 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.
|
|
Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization.
|
|
Archived 14 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine. Simon Sebag Montefiore estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937, during the deportation many people died, but the full number is not known.Sebag Montefiore, Simon (2014).
|
|
Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed.Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels under Stalin.
|
|
This led to widespread confusion and uncertainty as to what offenses warranted deportation and what actions could guarantee safety. Deportees often blamed local informants of MGB who, they believed, acted out of petty revenge or greed, but Estonian researchers found that deportee lists were compiled with minimal local input. List of kulaks were to be prepared by local executive committees and officially approved by the Council of Ministers, but due to the tight deadline and top secret nature of the task, local MGB offices compiled their own lists of kulaks. This caused much confusion during the operation.
|
|
Do it in such > a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, > shout: "strangling (is done) and will continue for the bloodsucking kulaks". > Telegraph the receipt and the implementation. Yours, Lenin. P.S. Use your > toughest people for this.
|
|
The Kulaks were supposedly wealthy (comparatively to other Soviet peasants) and were considered to be capitalists by the state, and by extension enemies of socialism. The term would also become associated with anyone who opposed or even seemed unsatisfied with the Soviet government.
|
|
The activist's body is sent down the river like the kulaks were. The bear begins to weep, feeling isolated from the group. Voschev explains the bear feels that way because he has no purpose in life except to work. Nastya's condition is also worsening.
|
|
Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich peasants, or kulaks, who benefited from the NEP, the program proved highly beneficial and the economy revived. The NEP would later come under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's death in early 1924.
|
|
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the Soviets and proletariat; serednyaks were considered unreliable, "hesitating" allies; and kulaks were identified as class enemies, as they owned land (this was later expanded to include those who owned livestock). However, a middle peasant who did not hire labor and was little engaged in trade "might yet (if he had a large family) hold three cows and two horses." There were other measures that indicated the kulaks as not being especially prosperous. Both peasants and Soviet officials were often uncertain as to what constituted a 'kulak'.
|
|
In July 1929, it remained official Soviet policy that the kulaks should not be terrorized and should be enlisted into the collective farms. However, Stalin disagreed: > 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. A decree by the Central Committee on January 5, 1930 was titled "On the pace of collectivization and state assistance to collective-farm construction." Andrei Suslov argues that the seizure of peasants' property led directly to the destruction of an entire social group: the peasant‐owners.
|
|
Stalin ordered for kulaks "to be liquidated as a class," and this was the cause of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. This famine has complicated attempts to identify the number of deaths arising from the executions of kulaks. A wide range of death tolls has been suggested, from as many as six million suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whereas the much lower number of 700,000 deaths are estimated by Soviet sources. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published only in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books based on these sources have said that 1,317,022 reached the destinations.
|
|
The kulaks were divided into three categories: those to be executed for treason or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; those to be exiled for treason to Siberia, North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after determined to be traitors the government confiscation of their property occurred ; and those considered traitors or where guilty of terrorism to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts. The combination of the elimination of kulaks, collectivization, and other repressive policies contributed to mass starvation in many parts of the Soviet Ukraine and the death of at least 7 to 10 million peasants in 1930–1937.
|
|
The directive exiled from Azerbaijan 2,500 Iranian nationals and 700 families of counterrevolutionary elements (former mullahs, kulaks, persons previously sentenced). ;January 23 - January 30: Trial of the "Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center". Among those sentenced to death were Georgy Pyatakov, Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Nikolai Muralov.
|
|
Komsomol members seize "grain hidden by kulaks" 1 November 1930 Kombat, possibly 12 July 1942 Great Patriotic War, 1 April 1944 Max Vladimirovich Alpert (; 18 March 1899 – 30 November 1980) was a prominent Soviet photographer, who was mostly known for his frontline work during World War II.
|
|
The neighbors helped large families and poor families to build their houses. In 1933 the household of Gavrila Yakovlevich Shul`gin was "dekulakizated" (dispossessed and repressed by Soviet power). The family had six children: five sons and one daughter. The villagers did not consider this family was kulaks.
|
|
Sometimes the food was requisitioned from kulaks considered the "saboteurs". Acquired food was divided: half taken by the organisation which sent the prodotryad and half was donated to Narkomprod (People's Commissariat for the Food Supply). With an emergence of NEP, the new economic policy, prodotryads were disbanded in 1921.
|
|
Large landholders unwilling to join cooperatives and unwise enough to demur were condemned as "kulaks" and evicted without compensation. Subsequent criticism was muted. By 1960, when collectivization was essentially complete, 90% of all agricultural land was in the state sector—a proportion that slowly increased to 95% in 1985.
|
|
BBC News. 24 November 2006. surviving kulaks were persecuted and many sent to Gulags to do forced labour. Stalin was also responsible for the Great Purge of 1937–38 in which the NKVD executed 681,692 people; millions of people were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
|
|
By this time it > had no 'social' or 'economic' context whatsoever, but it had a marvelous > sound: Podkulachnik - 'a person aiding the kulaks.' In other words, I > consider you an accomplice of the enemy. And that finishes you. The most > tattered laborer in the countryside could quite easily be labeled a > podkulachnik.
|
|
This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. The rich peasants (kulaks) withheld their surplus grain to sell on the black market.Carr, EH, 1966, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, Part 2, p. 233.Chase, WJ, 1987, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labour and Life in Moscow 1918–1929 pp. 26–27.
|
|
1947) Електронний архів УКРАЇНСЬКОГО ВИЗВОЛЬНОГО РУХУ. Retrieved 3 May 2020 (in Russian). In May 1948 he was the general coordinator for operation Spring (in Russian Vesna) in Lithuanian SSR, deporting according to the official statistics 39,482 people accused in nationalism, banditry and being kulaks along with their family members.Сталинские депортации 1928–1953 / сост.
|
|
Eventually, in what Issac Deutscher calls "the great change",Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, pp. 296ff, Penguin, (1966) the policies of industrialisation and collectivisation were carried out in a ruthless and brutal way, via the use of the security and military forces, without the direct involvement of the working class and peasantry itself and without seeming regard for the social consequences. According to figures given by Deutscher, the peasants opposed forced collectivisation by slaughtering 18 million horses, 30 million cattle, about 45 per cent of the total, and 100 million sheep and goats, about two thirds of the total. Those who engaged in these behaviours, deemed Kulaks, were dealt with harshly; in December 1929, Stalin issued a call to "liquidate the Kulaks as a class".
|
|
On 2 July 1937, Stalin sent a top-secret letter to all regional Party chiefs (with a copy to NKVD regional chiefs) ordering them to present, within five days, estimates of the number of kulaks and "criminals" that should be arrested, executed, or sent to camps. Produced in a matter of days, these figures roughly matched those of "suspect" individuals already under police surveillance, although the criteria used to distribute the "kulak and criminal elements" among the two categories are not clear. On 30 July 1937 the NKVD Order no. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.).
|
|
Hergé also included an incident depicting state requisitioning of kulaks' grain. Similar events occurred under War Communism and later dekulakization campaign during the collectivization.Hergé, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, pp. 81-6. Douillet portrayed Communists in the USSR in a very negative light and this influenced the portrayal of Communists in Hergé's book.
|
|
241-244, 255-256, 261-262 his original perspective on Marxism remained strongly connected with party doctrine in its most essential pointsCioroianu, p.241, 248-251, 254-255 (including his intense advocacy of collectivization, using statistics to point out the existence of a class of chiaburi, the Romanian equivalent of the Soviet kulaks).Cioroianu, p.
|
|
315 In addition to NKVD troops, destruction battalions were used for auxiliary duties. From 1946 to early 1948, the civilian deportations were relatively small. The main method of oppression were individual arrests of "enemies of the people" and subsequent mass deportations of the prisoners. The deportations targeted Lithuanian partisans and their supported, but also included kulaks () and bourgeoisie.
|
|
The term "purge" is often associated with Stalinism. While leading the USSR, Joseph Stalin imprisoned in Gulag- labor camps and executed, i.e. purged, kulaks, many military officers, ethnic minorities, and "wreckers", or citizens accused of plotting against Communism. Stalin together with Nikolai Yezhov initiated the most notorious of the CPSU purges, the Great Purge, during the 1930s.
|
|
Accordingly, Stalin imposed collectivization of agriculture. Land held by the kulaks was seized and given to agricultural cooperatives (kolkhozes and sovkhozes). Lenin and his followers saw the NEP as an interim measure. However, it proved highly unpopular with the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party because of its compromise with some capitalist elements and the relinquishment of state control.
|
|
Stalin's regime proceeded to eliminate the intelligentsia of Ukraine, to forcibly deport Ukrainian Kulaks who opposed its collectivization policies, and to orchestrate a deliberate mass starvation by hunger of Ukrainians, wherever they were found throughout the Soviet Empire.Genocide Revealed . Retrieved 3 December 2011. This documentary reinforces the view that the Holodomor was indeed an act of genocide.
|
|
In 1924, veteran Bolshevik Petrov, a resident of Tsaritsyn, begins carrying a letter to Vladimir Lenin, to inform him about Kulak brigands roaming the land and spreading death and misery. The Kulaks murder him. His widow, Varvara, continues his quest, joining a group that travels to Moscow. When they arrive, they discover that Lenin is dead.
|
|
Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov with a fellow miner; Stalin's government initiated the Stakhanovite movement to encourage hard work. It was partly responsible for a substantial rise in production during the 1930s. In 1929, the Politburo announced the mass collectivisation of agriculture, establishing both kolkhozy collective farms and sovkhoz state farms. Stalin barred kulaks from joining these collectives.
|
|
The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements Oxford University Press 2007, hardback, 320 pages The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and build socialism in the countryside. This policy was accomplished simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union and effectively brought all agriculture in the Soviet Union under state control. May 1926 illustration to the Soviet categories of peasants: bednyaks, or poor peasants; serednyaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the those that possessed capital and significant wealth those who had much larger farms than most Russian peasants The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" was announced by Stalin on December 27, 1929. The decision was formalized in a resolution, "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization", on January 30, 1930.
|
|
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region.Western- Siberian resolution of deportation of 40,000 kulaks to northern Siberia, May 5, 1931. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества). It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of the peasants against the Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonization of the countryside.
|
|
Morozov was the first in this book, according to the official version, bravely exposing the crimes of kulaks against Soviet power and killed by them. The second one was Kolya Myagotin, also killed by class enemies. The art description of some of the pioneers, in particular Pavlik Morozov,Ю. Дружников. Доносчик 001, или вознесение Павлика Морозова Grisha Aakopyan Сергей Карамаев.
|
|
During the 1930s, Kotlas became a place to which kulaks were deported and made to work in the forestry industry. It was managed by the Kotlaslag division of Gulag. Later, it hosted all possible categories of people repressed during the Stalin era. A significant population of Poles existed in the area, with whole Polish villages resettled here in 1920s and 1930s.
|
|
The Democratic Front was open to all Albanians aged eighteen and older excepting the former bourgeoisie, kulaks, and other perceived anti-state elements.Skendi, p. 87. Albanian author Anton Logoreci writes that, "Without a Democratic Front card [a person] cannot obtain work, get a ration book (when one is required), make a purchase at government stores and so on."Logoreci, Anton.
|
|
Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, I.B. Tauris Publishers. London and New York. Print. 133. Kulaks were farmers resisting Stalin's crop collectivization, and Anka's lover uses the party card for iniquitous purposes. In the final scene of the movie she confronts him at gunpoint and, after he ignominiously begs forgiveness, she has him arrested by the authorities.
|
|
216-221 from Forever In The Shadow Of Hitler? edited by Ernst > Piper, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993 pp. 218-219. Möller argued that Habermas was guilty to trying to justify Soviet crimes by writing of the "expulsion of the kulaks". Möller wrote that Habermas was either "ignorant or shameless" in accusing Nolte, Hillgruber and Hildebrand of being Nazi apologists.
|
|
He and Snowy observe a government official handing out bread to homeless Marxists but denying it to their opponents; Snowy steals a loaf and gives it to a starving boy. Spying on a secret Bolshevik meeting, Tintin learns that all the Soviet grain is being exported abroad for propaganda purposes, leaving the people starving, and that the government plans to "organise an expedition against the kulaks, the rich peasants, and force them at gunpoint to give us their corn." Tintin infiltrates the Red Army and warns some of the kulaks to hide their grain, but the army catches him and sentences him to death by firing squad. By planting blanks in the soldiers' rifles, Tintin fakes his death and is able to make his way into the snowy wilderness, where he discovers an underground Bolshevik hideaway in a haunted house.
|
|
The original plan targeted several types of kulaks, peasants, "urban elements," people living in the agricultural areas of Soviet Union's western territories such as the Ukrainian SSR, and the Lower Volga, North Caucasus and Black Earth Region in the Russian SFSR. Instead, many of the deportees were people from Moscow and Leningrad who had been unable to obtain an internal passport. The passportization campaign in the Soviet Union began with a decision by the Politburo on December 27, 1932, to issue internal passports to all residents of major cities, and one of their objectives was to "cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and the other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected with production or administrative work, as well as kulaks, criminals, and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements."Protocol of the Politburo meeting of November 15, 1932, Istochnik no.
|
|
On May 21, 1947, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) authorized collectivization of Estonian agriculture. Initially it was implemented with great difficulties in the Baltic republics but it was facilitated by mass deportations of dissident farmers, termed 'kulaks'. As a result, by the end of April 1949, half of the remaining individual farmers in Estonia had joined kolkhozes.Eesti nõukogude entsüklopeedia (Estonian Soviet Encyclopedia).
|
|
Many did not survive the labor camps. Many were deported as a result of the collectivization of all Soviet agricultural land in 1930/1931 by Stalin's first five-year plan. The German farmers were labelled kulaks (rich peasants) by the Communist regime, and those who did not voluntarily agree to give up their land to the Soviet farming collectives were expelled to Siberia and Central Asia.
|
|
Percentage of depopulation during the Soviet famine of 1932-33. Formerly Don Cossack lands are on right. The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of the kulaks. According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".
|
|
By 1912, 16% of peasants (up from 11% in 1903) had relatively large endowments of over per male family member (a threshold used in statistics to distinguish between middle-class and prosperous farmers, i.e. the kulaks). At that time, an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children. The number of such farmers amounted to 20% of the rural population, producing almost 50% of marketable grain.
|
|
The word itself is foreign to Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, struggle with kulaks in Ukraine was taking place more intensely than anywhere else in the Soviet Union.Korkulism at the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia. Coincidentally with the start of First "pyatiletka" (5 year plan), a new commissariat of the Soviet Union was created, better known as Narkomzem (People's Commissariat of Land Cultivation) led by Yakov Yakovlev.
|
|
After the United Opposition were illegalized in December 1927, the Kulaks and NEPmen were emboldened and exerted much greater economic pressure on the Soviet government in the months afterwards. In January 1928, Stalin personally travelled to Siberia where he oversaw the seizure of grain stockpiles from kulak farmers. Many in the Communist Party supported the seizures, but Bukharin and Premier Rykov were outraged.Simon Sebag Montefiore.
|
|
Prokhorov was born in Moscow to Tamara and Dmitri Prokhorov. He has one sibling, an elder sister, Irina. His maternal grandmother, Anna Belkina, was a Jewish microbiologist who remained in Moscow during World War II to make vaccines while her daughter Tamara was moved east to safety. His paternal grandparents were relatively wealthy peasant farmers (known as kulaks) who were persecuted as class enemies under the Bolsheviks and again under Stalin.
|
|
With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime.
|
|
This policy of resettlement was especially true for the Terek Cossacks land. The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of kulaks. The famine of 1933 hit the Don and Kuban territory the hardest. According to Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 3 million, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Cossacks".
|
|
After the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland some Belarus Communists murdered a number of osadniks, e.g. in Trzeciaki, Budowla and Lerypol of the Grodno County (1919–1939). After the incorporation of Kresy into the Soviet Union, the term osadnik became one of the categories of crimes in a Soviet penal system. Initially branded as kulaks, from the very first days became a target of Soviet propaganda as enemies of the people.
|
|
238 (republished by the Romanian Cultural Institute's România Culturală ) or wealthy peasants known as chiaburi (the equivalent of kulaks). Gheorghe Mândrescu, "Grafica şi propaganda în primii ani ai regimului comunist în România. Exemple din colecţia Muzeului Naţional de Artă din Cluj-Napoca" , in Tribuna, Nr. 48, September 2004, p.21 The latter were especially controversial, since they coincided with the forced collectivization and the murderous campaign targeting the rural elites.
|
|
The bear takes Nastya and Chiklin hunting for the kulaks whom were not liquidated. Before dying, one of their victims shouts out, "The only person who’ll ever reach socialism is that one important man of yours." They send the last of the corpses down the river and set up speakers for music and dancing. Zhachev isn't having a good time and keeps knocking peasants onto the ground for fun.
|
|
In January 1930, the Politburo approved the liquidation of the kulak class; accused kulaks were rounded up and exiled to other parts of the country or to concentration camps. Large numbers died during the journey. By July 1930, over 320,000 households had been affected by the de-kulakisation policy. According to Stalin biographer Dmitri Volkogonov, de-kulakisation was "the first mass terror applied by Stalin in his own country".
|
|
Based on this argument, he asked Malenkov to approve the establishment of regional female sections of the PCM. During the 1945 and 1946 Plenaries, he raised the issue of anti-Soviet resistance in the Moldavian SSR, which he saw as directly encouraged by the Orthodox Church and the Inochentists. He described resisters as "traitors" and kulaks, recounting that one Romanian man openly bragged about educating his children to be "fascists".Șevcenco (2017), pp.
|
|
Ukhnalev was born in Leningrad in 1931, during the soviet famine of 1932-1933. Dekulakization was pursued during this period, which was meant to highlight the economic disparity present in Russia prior to the political ascent of the Bolsheviks. Thegovernment imposed collectivization of agricultural activity, such as wheat, grain and livestock production, under the theory that kulaks ("rich" peasants) were the main culprits. The consequences of collectivization were drastic- approximately 5.5.-6.5.
|
|
A distinction was made between the elimination of the Kulaks as a class and the killing of is the individuals themselves;Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p324, Penguin, (1966) nevertheless, at least 530,000 to 600,000 deaths resulted from dekulakization from 1929 to 1933,Hildermeier, Die Sowjetunion, p. 38 f. and Robert Conquest has estimated that there could have been as many as five million deaths.Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
|
|
Prisoners that had a shorter prison sentence than three years were to remain in the prison system that was still under the purview of the NKVD. The purpose of these new camps was to colonise the remote and inhospitable environments throughout the Soviet Union. These changes took place around the same time that Stalin started to institute collectivisation and rapid industrial development. Collectivisation resulted in a large scale purge of peasants and so-called Kulaks.
|
|
An account published in the Bulletin Communiste of 1930 on the 'Soviet situation at the end of 1929' read: > It is a true terror. A terror that takes two forms. The first are the > tribunals who condemn whole blocks of people to death. You would be charged > with a supposed assassination attempt against some person of authority, or > for some attempt to burn a kolkhoz and so two, three, four 'kulaks' were > shot.
|
|
Molotov as premier. During the Central Committee plenum of 19 December 1930, Molotov succeeded Alexey Rykov as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (the equivalent of a Western head of government). In this post, Molotov oversaw agricultural collectivisation under Stalin's regime. He followed Stalin's line by using a combination of force and propaganda to crush peasant resistance to collectivisation, including the deportation of millions of kulaks (peasants with property) to gulags.
|
|
The front of the Russian Civil War was just north of the Vologda Governorate, leading to the Soviet government to intensify its mobilization measures: in addition to conscripting the local population to the Red Army, the government took away horses which were crucial for the peasant economy. The uprising was led by wealthy peasants whom the Soviet government labeled as Kulaks. Many were executed, while others were deprived of their civil rights.
|
|
This persistent strength of so-called "kulaks" in the Soviet countryside further contributed to the dissatisfaction with the economic status quo on the part of many members of the largely urban Communist Party. From the end of 1926 demand among planners and party activists for a new program of mass industrialization that would modernize the largely peasant country.Thorniley, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Rural Communist Party, 1927-39, pg. 13.
|
|
Collectivisation in the Baltic states was introduced in early 1947, but the progress was slow. Despite new heavy taxes on farmers and intense propaganda, only about 3% of farms in Lithuania and Estonia joined kolkhozes by the end of 1948. Borrowing from the collectivisation experiences of the early 1930s, kulaks were named as the primary obstacle and became targets of repressions. It is unclear when the idea of a mass deportation was advanced.
|
|
Soviet deportations from Estonia were a series of mass deportations by the Soviet Union from Estonia in 1941 and 1945–1951. The two largest waves of deportations occurred in June 1941 and March 1949 simultaneously in all three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). The deportations targeted various categories of anti-Soviet elements and "enemies of the people": nationalists (i.e. political elite, military officers, policemen of independent Estonia), Forest Brothers, kulaks, and others.
|
|
Dovzhenko wrote the original scenario for Earth in 1929 in response to the newfound collectivisation of small villages in Ukraine, which he described as "a period not only of economic transformation but also of mental transformation of the whole people." He based the character of Semyon on his own grandfatherKepley, p. 4. and the murder of Vasyl on the assassination of a Soviet agent by Kulaks in his own home district.Kepley, p. 76.
|
|
They became really popular during the Stolypin reform in the early 20th century. During the collectivization, however, residents of such settlements were usually declared to be kulaks and had all their property confiscated and distributed to others (nationalized) without any compensation. The stanitsa likewise has not survived as an administrative term. The stanitsa was a type of a collective community that could include one or more settlements such as villages, khutirs, and others.
|
|
The NKVD Order no. 00447 by July 30, 1937 О репрессировании бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов ("Concerning the repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements") undersigned by Nikolai Yezhov. By this order, troikas were created on the levels of republic, krai and oblast. Investigation was to be performed by 'operative groups' "in a speedy and simplified way" and the results were to be delivered to troikas for trials.
|
|
The policy of leftist deviation proved counterproductive. Leftist deviation gave a real meaningful sense to the policy of those nationalists who found a way out of the difficult situation in collaboration with occupying and quisling forces. "Red terror" antagonized most of the peasantry and angered the Soviet Union. As a result of the communist actions, villagers from Eastern Herzegovina and Montenegro, who were far from being collaborators or kulaks, joined Chetnik forces en masse.
|
|
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.
|
|
Last accessed on 15 November 2006. The prisons soon got severely overcrowded. with detainees suspected of anti-Soviet activities and the NKVD had to open dozens of ad hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests led to forced resettlement of large categories of people (kulaks, Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union.
|
|
On 18 January 1949, leaders of all three Baltic republics were called to report to Joseph Stalin. That day, during a session of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the decision was made to carry out the deportations. On 29 January, the top secret decision No. 390-138 ssInitials ss stand for top secret (совершенно секретно). was adopted by the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, approving the deportation of kulaks, nationalists, bandits (i.e.
|
|
IX He also cites fellow critic Alexandru Piru, who defines Baconsky's early productions as bearing "the strong imprint of journalism". This series included controversial stanzas about communization, the Romanian collectivization process, and class struggle against wealthy peasants known as chiaburi (Romanian for kulaks). Bogdan Creţu, "A. E. Baconsky: un destin contorsionat, oglindit în propria operă" , in Convorbiri Literare, October 2007 Other portions of his work were dedicated to industrialization policies, around subjects related to Brad factories.
|
|
Davies, R.W., The Soviet Collective Farms, 1929–1930, Macmillan, London (1980), p. 1. As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill Stalin gave his estimate of the number of "kulaks" who were repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported.Valentin Berezhkov, "Kak ya stal perevodchikom Stalina", Moscow, DEM, 1993, . p.
|
|
Stolypin was a monarchist and hoped to strengthen the throne by modernizing the backward Russian rural economy. Modernity and efficiency were his goals, not democracy. He argued that the land question could only be resolved, and revolution averted, when the peasants communal system was abolished and a stable landowning class of peasants created – the kulaks – who would have a stake in the status quo. His successes and failures have been subject of heated controversies among scholars.
|
|
On April 6, 1949, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee issued decision number 1290-467cc, which called for 11,280 families from Moldavian SSR to be deported as kulaks or collaborators with the "German fascists occupier" during World War II. Ultimately, 11,239 families, comprising 35,050 persons were detained and deported on July 6, 1949, with the rest either escaping or being exempt due to their contribution to the Soviet war effort or their support for collectivisation.
|
|
By vilifying kulaks, Stalin aimed to diminish public sympathy for them. Socialist realism is promoted since, at the end of the movie, her loyalty to the party takes precedence over her romantic feelings; therefore, Stalin approved its production. However, not all films earned his approval. One example is the 1940 film, The Law of Life, which was retracted from cinemas after ten days because it negatively portrayed a Komsomol leader by depicting him as hypocritical and abusing his power.
|
|
Chiklin finds out that the local priest has been providing the activist with a list of names of the people who enter the church to pray. He punches the priest on principle. A few days later, the activist announces that the kulaks will be exterminated as a class, and then their bodies will be sent down the river on a makeshift raft. Many peasants were expecting this to happen and stopped taking care of themselves long ago.
|
|
One woman, for instance, is alive only to the pain she feels when stray dogs chew on her feet. Others rip their plants out of the ground by the roots, refusing to let their property be taken into collectivization. The rest of the peasants spend the night involuntarily vomiting. Zhachev and Nastya visit the village, and Yelisey introduces them to the local blacksmith: an anthropomorphic bear who touts a keen ability to sniff out and kill kulaks.
|
|
Postyshev wrote in his report that the majority were exiled or shot. The highest ranking were paraded through elaborate show trials. As the purges progressed after 1933, affecting millions throughout the Soviet Union, Postyshev's crackdown spread beyond perceived "Ukrainianizers," "nationalists," and opponents of collectivization. Eventually it came to include the liquidation of entire classes such as kulaks, priests, people who had been members of anti-Bolshevik armies, and even ethnic Ukrainians who had travelled abroad or immigrated from Galicia.
|
|
Labor settlements (трудопоселение, trudoposelenie) were a method of internal exile that used settlers for obligatory labor. The main category of "labor settlers" (трудопоселенцы, trudoposelentsy) were kulaks and members of their families deported in 1930s before the Great Purge. Labor settlements were under the management of the Gulag, but they must not be confused with labor camps. The first official document that decreed wide-scale "dekulakization" was a joint decree of Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom on 1 February 1930.
|
|
In 1929, as a trusted supporter of Josif Stalin, Eikhe was appointed First Secretary of the Siberian territorial communist party. From 1930, after a boundary change, he was First Secretary of the West Siberian regional party committee, and a member of the Central Committee of the communist party in 1930–1938. Robert Eikhe Eikhe was also a member of the Politburo commission appointed in January 1930, chaired by Molotov, which drafted instructions on eliminating private farms and forcing the farmers onto collective farms. Speaking in Novosibirsk on 27 January 1930, he called for brutal measures against the kulaks (the name given to 'rich' peasants, or more generally to any who resisted collectivisation). Eikhe called for "the most hostile, reactionary kulaks" be held in concentration camps in "distant areas of the North" such as Narym or Turukhansk, while the others should be made to do forced labour, for instance building a 550 mile road from Tomsk to Yeniseysk. In a single month, in May–June 1931, 39,788 peasant families in West Siberia had their farms seized.
|
|
The first post-war years were marked by particularly dismal and sombre events in the fate of the Latvian nation. On March 25, 1949, 43,000 rural residents ("kulaks") and Latvian patriots ("nationalists") were deported to Siberia in a sweeping repressive Operation Priboi in all three Baltic States, which was carefully planned and approved in Moscow already on January 29, 1949. Altogether 120,000 Latvian inhabitants were imprisoned or deported to Soviet concentration camps (the Gulag). Some managed to escape arrest and joined the partisans.
|
|
Elizaveta tells Andrey their marriage is over: she has chosen Vladimir and will stay on in the USSR. The atmosphere darkens with a series of peremptory trials presided over by Vladimir: crimes against the individual are punished leniently, crimes against property (and therefore the State) with terrible vengeance. When some peasants are accused of being kulaks and sentenced to the Gulag for "hoarding" small quantities of grain, Andrey, watching, can take no more. He snatches Blok's pistol and shoots him dead.
|
|
A warning against the use of violent means in the process of collectivization was issued by Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in 1951. Moreover, after the marginalization of Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, he accused the two of instigating provocative measures and "trampling on the free consent by the peasants" during the process. In 1961 the Romanian leader also condemned the large number of public trials against peasants "in the name of the struggle against Kulaks" during the first phase of collectivization.Jowitt, p.
|
|
The republic was declared to be a non-national entity based on the equality of all nationalities. Nationalization of industry and confiscation of the land of landlords, kulaks, and the church were implemented. The Crimean SSR was more friendly toward the interests of Crimean Tatars than the Taurida SSR had been and leftist Tatars were allowed to take positions in the government. Starting in late May, Anton Denikin's White Volunteer Army, which had been gaining strength, threatened seizure of Crimea.
|
|
"Strengthen working discipline in collective farms" – Soviet propaganda poster issued in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1933 Illustration to the Soviet categories of peasants: bednyaks, or poor peasants; serednyaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the higher-income farmers who had larger farms than most Russian peasants. Published Projector May 1926. The Soviet Union implemented the collectivization () of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan.
|
|
Background Note: Latvia at US Department of State On January 12, 1949 the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a decree "on the expulsion and deportation" from Latvia of "all kulaks and their families, the families of bandits and nationalists", and others. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940–1953. In addition, at least 75,000 were sent to Gulag. 10 percent of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps.
|
|
After 1956, the palace was displaced and left as a vacancy as part of the "war with the kulaks", gradually devastating according to top-down guidelines. Most of the inhabitants of Rybarzowice worked at the nearby lignite mine and Turów Power Plant. The youth found entertainment in the Village Culture Centre, where there was a common room with a spacious hall and stage. The Volunteer Fire Brigade, the Village Housewives' Circle and many other organizations of the active Rybnik community were active.
|
|
102, 107. Timothy Snyder attributes 300,000 deaths during the Great purge to "national terror" including ethnic minorities and Ukrainian Kulaks who survived the early 1930s.Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Basic Books 2010 Page 411–412 In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized the phrase. Conquest's title itself was an allusion to the period from the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror (French: la Terreur, "the Terror"; from June to July 1794: la Grande Terreur, 'the Great Terror').
|
|
The requisition of grains from wealthy peasants (kulaks) during the forced collectivization in Timashyovsky District, Kuban Soviet Union. 1933 Agricultural collectivization, within Russia, had its origins under Lenin during the New Economic Policy. One reason for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was to increase the number of industrial workers for the new factories. Soviet officials also believed that collectivization would increase crop yields and help fund other programs. The Soviets enacted a land decree in 1917 that eliminated private ownership of land.
|
|
Kulaks, Tolstoyans, and Baptists also were active in illicit anti-Communist electoral campaigning. Peasants demanded the creation of "peasant unions" on an equal footing with urban trade unions, and urban workers complained that Communist officials had become a new privileged class. Ethnic strife and the Soviet government's financial support of Comintern were also issues raised against the official candidates. Marches in opposition to the official candidates were held and in some areas in the provinces Communist officials were physically attacked.
|
|
All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories: # Those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police # Those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property # 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.
|
|
The Bolshevik government tried to build an anti-revolutionary, anti-communist image for the Green armies. Provincial Communist officials announced to locals that the Green armies were a subsection of the villainous White movement, despite the fact that Green armies were generally just as hostile to the Whites as they were to the Reds. The Bolsheviks also exaggerated the influence of the kulaks in Green armies, who were undoubtedly involved but hardly the driving force of the movement.Radkey, Unknown Civil War, 78-80, 104-7, 407.
|
|
Portion of German settled population in Crimea in 1926 In red indicated German national districts in the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic On 18 October 1921 the so-called Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created as part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (i.e. part of Russia). In place of today Krasnohvardiiske Raion there were created two national districts for Germans Biyuk-Onlar and Telman. Under the Soviet regime many Volksdeutsche were persecuted by gangs of Russian peasants as landowning Kulaks or class enemy bourgeoisie.
|
|
During the summer of 1918, many of Russia's central cities, including Moscow and Petrograd, were cut off from the grain-producing regions of Ukraine, northern Caucasus, and Siberia by the civil war. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were on the brink of starvation. The Penza Gubernia was critical in providing food to the cities and the government used effective measures, such as prodrazvyorstka (forcible requisitioning), to collect grain from the kulaks. The Central Committee sent Yevgenia Bosch to supervise grain collection.
|
|
In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed. Modern historical studies estimate a total number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 as 950,000–1,200,000. These figures take into account the incompleteness of official archival data and include both execution deaths and Gulag deaths during that period. Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.
|
|
Still others were relocated forcibly during the Joseph Stalin years. Additionally, compulsory attendance in boarding schools located in towns such as Kazym meant that Khanty children were removed from traditional homes and, for many years, were forbidden to speak their native tongue or follow their cultural beliefs. This process went alongside the abduction and execution of traditional leaders who were labelled "kulaks" by the state. Eventually there was a revolt in 1933 by many Khanty with support from the Forest Nenets called the Kazym rebellion.
|
|
The restructuring was supposed to take place in the "fire of the class struggle". Minc saw the kulak as a "village capitalist", who "exploits other peasants". Given this imprecise definition, Party officials decided that a Polish kulak was a farmer whose farm was larger than 15 hectares (in Southern and Eastern Poland - 8 to 10 hectares). Furthermore, those farmers who had at least two horses were identified as kulaks, so any Polish peasant who ran his farm properly could have been accused of being a kulak.
|
|
Main road of Filadelfia The Fernheim Colony is a Plautdietsch-speaking settlement of Mennonites originally from Russia of about 5000 in the Chaco of Paraguay. Mennonites from the Soviet Union founded it between 1930 and 1932. Filadelfia is the administrative center of the colony, seat of Boquerón department and is considered the 'Capital of the Chaco'. In the late 1920s, some Mennonite refugees tried to escape persecution and "Kulaks" in Stalinist Russia, which meant the total destruction of the Mennonite religious and cultural life.
|
|
After the Russian Revolution, the Kulaks - relatively affluent and well-endowed peasants - were persecuted by the Soviet Government as class enemies of the poor, and hence enemies of the Revolution itself. > In every village, there were people who in one way or another had gotten in > the way of local activists. [Following the revolution, it] was the perfect > time to settle accounts with them of jealousy, envy, insult. A new word was > needed for these new victims as a class- and it was born.
|
|
During the 1930s, the Soviet Union was lead by Joseph Stalin, who sought to reshape Soviet society with aggressive economic planning. As the leader of the Soviet Union, he constructed a state whose policies have been blamed for millions of deaths. A campaign of political repression, including arrests, deportations, and executions of people proclaimed traitors engaged in sabotaging collectivism, often targeted for belonging to specific demographic groups rather than as individuals, occurred from 1929 to 1932. The bourgeois were labeled kulaks and were class enemies.
|
|
Excluding those sentenced in the 1920s–1930s, over 250,000 Belarusians were deported as kulaks or kulak family members in regions outside the Belarusian Soviet Republic. The scale of Soviet terror in Belarus was higher than in Russia or Ukraine which resulted in a much stronger extent of Russification in the republic. A Polish Autonomous District was founded in 1932 and disbanded in 1935. In September 1939, the Soviet Union, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, occupied eastern Poland after the 1939 invasion of Poland.
|
|
That is > what we call Socialism in practice. In our fields the tillers of the land > work without landlords and without kulaks. The work is directed by men and > women of the people. That is what we call Socialism in daily life, that is > what we call a free, socialist life...I would like you, comrades, to > exercise systematic influence on your deputies, to impress upon them that > they must constantly keep before them the great image of the great Lenin and > imitate Lenin in all things.
|
|
Various media outlets began complaining increasingly of "kulaks" and "parasites", fuelling racial tensions around Asian shopkeepers. Many Roman Catholics were angered when the government nationalised Catholic schools and made them non-denominational. Nyerere's government established a Ministry of National Culture and Youth through which to encourage the growth of a distinctly Tanzanian culture. Through organisations it established, such as Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam and the Baraza la Muzikila Taifa music council, the government exerted considerable control over the development of popular culture in the country.
|
|
The transfer was not formally finalized until 1946. The territory was subjected to forcible collectivization, accompanied by rampant robbery and destruction, including the demolition of farmsteads and mass mortality among livestock. Kulaks, nationalists, and "bandits" (often those accused of being Forest Brothers) were deported with their families (2728 persons in early 1949 and 1563 persons in May 1950), primarily to Krasnoyarsk. Officials from Russia proper replaced local administrators even at the village level, and even some who had fought for the Soviets were mistreated.
|
|
The troikas were tasked with administering quick punishment of anti-Soviet elements, without public trial or investigation. The sentences that were doled out, executions, were to be held in secret. In January 1930, as part of the collectivization program, the Soviet Politburo authorized the state police to screen the peasant population of the entire Soviet Union. Normal legal procedures were suspended and the corresponding OGPU order of the 2nd of February, specified the measures needed for "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class".
|
|
This instituted a regional based system for these troikas to work, so that the operations could be handed locally and with a quicker result. In each region, the troikas would decide the fate of the peasants branded as "kulaks". The troika, composed of a member of the state police, a local communist party secretary, and a state procurator, had the authority to issue rapid and severe verdicts (death or exile) without the right to appeal. In effect they served as judges, juries, and executioners.
|
|
Soviet famine of 1932–33. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black. As part of the first five-year plan, collectivization was introduced in the Soviet Union by general secretary Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy). At the same time, Joseph Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks (farmland owners).
|
|
They sold household goods, mostly hardware. In 1940, the shop was nationalised, the family was announced Kulaks, Mihkel, the son was killed and part of the family was deported in 1949. In 1945, the Obinitsa Village Council was set up in the building. After that, the building has also hosted a dairy, post office, medical aid station, library and a community centre. Obinitsa sovkhoz office was located in the building during 1960-1995 Evar Riitsaar set up a gallery called Hal’as kunn in the building in 2004.
|
|
The prisons soon got severely overcrowded, with all detainees accused of anti-Soviet activities. The NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to the forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulaks", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadniks") to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union. Altogether the Soviets sent roughly a million people from Poland to Siberia.
|
|
The Great Purge of 1936–1938 can be roughly divided into four periods:N.G. Okhotin, A.B. Roginsky "Great Terror": Brief Chronology Memorial, 2007 ; October 1936 – February 1937:Reforming the security organizations, adopting official plans on purging the elites. ; March 1937 – June 1937:Purging the elites; adopting plans for the mass repressions against the "social base" of the potential aggressors, starting of purging the "elites" from opposition. ; July 1937 – October 1938:Mass repressions against "kulaks", "dangerous" ethnic minorities, family members of oppositionists, military officers, saboteurs in agriculture and industry.
|
|
Knickerbocker also wrote about dekulakization: "It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 [kulaks] ... died at once, or within a few years." Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death. This revealed the full enormity of the Purges. The first of these sources were the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev, which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Daily Worker, who, following the lead of The New York Times, published the Secret Speech in full.
|
|
Early in the Bolshevik period, predominantly before the end of the Russian Civil War and the emergence of the Soviet Union, Russian Mennonite communities were harassed; several Mennonites were killed or imprisoned, and women were raped. Anarcho- Communist Nestor Makhno was responsible for most of the bloodshed, which caused the normally pacifist Mennonites to take up arms in defensive militia units. This marked the beginning of a mass exodus of Mennonites to Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Mennonites were branded as kulaks by the Soviets.
|
|
In order to escape the oppression which the British Government let loose on the Raja's followers, Charan Singh's grandfather "Chaudhry Badam Singh" moved eastward along with his family to a village called Bhatona far beyond the Yamuna in Bulandshahr.Charan Singh, 1986, Land Reforms in the U.P. and the Kulaks, Page 1. For their participation in 1857 rebellion, three main chiefs of Haryana were tried and hanged at Kotwali in Chandani Chowk of Old Delhi. Nahar Singh, the Raja of Ballabhgarh, was hanged on 9 January 1858.
|
|
But he was > not powerful enough to ever publicly equate Bolshevism and Christianity, as > he often did in his dinner conversations. He also not powerful enough to > publicly demand or to justify, as Himmler often did in his circle of friends > and associates, the murder of women and children. That, of course, is not > proof of Hitler’s "humanity", but rather of the remnants of the liberal > system. The "extermination of the bourgeoisie" and the "liquidation of the > kulaks" were, in contrast proclaimed quite publicly.
|
|
Stalin destroyed the opposition in the party consisting of the old Bolsheviks during the Moscow trials. The NKVD under the leadership of Stalin's commissar Nikolai Yezhov carried out a series of massive repressive operations against the kulaks and various national minorities in the USSR. During the Great Purges of 1937-38, about 700 000 people were executed. Stalin's repressions led to the creation of a vast system of internal exile, of considerably greater dimensions than those set up in the past by the tsars.
|
|
Although officially voluntary, many peasants joined the collectives out of fear they would face the fate of the kulaks; others joined amid intimidation and violence from party loyalists. By 1932, about 62% of households involved in agriculture were part of collectives, and by 1936 this had risen to 90%. Many of the collectivised peasants resented the loss of their private farmland, and productivity slumped. Famine broke out in many areas, with the Politburo frequently ordering the distribution of emergency food relief to these regions.
|
|
Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, p. 322, Penguin, (1966) The Left Opposition had opposed the continued marketization of agriculture through the NEP, and, since 1924, had repeatedly called for investment in industry, some collectivization in agriculture and democratisation of the Party. Threatened by the growing power and revolt from the countryside led by the Kulaks and the strengthening bourgeoisie, the Fifteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party passed resolutions that supported for some of the planks of the Opposition’s platform, and on paper, the Congress’ views appeared very left, politically.
|
|
During the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917, the anti-Soviet side was the White movement. Between the wars, some resistance movement, particularly in the 1920s, was cultivated by Polish intelligence in the form of the Promethean project. After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, anti-Soviet forces were created and led primarily by Nazi Germany (see Russian Liberation Movement). In the time of the Russian Civil War, whole categories of people, such as clergy, kulaks and former Imperial Russian police, were automatically considered anti-Soviet.
|
|
The decree was signed by Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union, and , Administrator of Affairs of the Council of Ministers, and ordered "to eternally transfer 4000 anti-kolkhoz kulaks and their families to Krasnoyarsk Krai and Tomsk Oblast". The briefing of the Ministry of State Security (MGB) of the Lithuanian SSR was held on September 6. Lists of the deportees were to be prepared by local administration and committees of the Communist Party of Lithuania. An aggregate list was prepared by MGB listed 4,215 families (14,950 people).
|
|
When Greens conquered towns or villages, they did not install themselves politically, leaving the territory to be retaken later by Bolsheviks.Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War, 319-21. Furthermore, there was a great deal of tension within the bands, which often included agrarian peasants, kulaks, workers and Whites, many with preexisting resentment towards each other. The Green armies were underfunded, low on supplies, and outmatched by the Red Army (which, despite its flaws, had better organization and morale as a result of greater, more frequent victories).
|
|
This was most apparent when Lakoba refused to implement collectivisation, arguing that there were no kulaks (affluent peasants) in the state. Such a policy was defended by Stalin, who said the anti-kulak policy did not "take account of the specific peculiarities of Abkhaz social structure and made the mistake of mechanically transferring Russian models of social engineering to Abkhaz soil". Collectivisation was first carried out after Abkhazia was downgraded in 1931, and fully implemented in 1936 after Lakoba's death. Throughout the SSR's existence, the Soviet ruble was its official currency.
|
|
The Soviet base of support was strengthened by a land reform program initiated by the Soviets in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled "kulaks" and dispossessed of their land, which was then divided among poorer peasants. However, the Soviet authorities then started a campaign of forced collectivisation, which largely nullified the earlier gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas.
|
|
In his memoirs, Khrushchev noted that almost everyone who worked with him was arrested. By Party protocol, Khrushchev was required to approve these arrests, and did little or nothing to save his friends and colleagues. Party leaders were given numerical quotas of "enemies" to be turned in and arrested. In June 1937, the Politburo set a quota of 35,000 enemies to be arrested in Moscow province; 5,000 of these were to be executed. In reply, Khrushchev asked that 2,000 wealthy peasants, or kulaks living in Moscow be killed in part fulfillment of the quota.
|
|
The Bolsheviks hoped that the USSR's industrial base would reach the level of capitalist countries in the West, to avoid losing a future war. (Stalin proclaimed, "Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.") Stalin asserted that the grain crisis was caused by kulaks – relatively wealthy farmers who allegedly "hoarded" grain and participated in "speculation of agricultural produce". He also considered peasant farms too small to support the massive agricultural demands of the Soviet Union's push for rapid industrialization, and Soviet economists claimed that only large collective farms could support such an expansion.
|
|
Expeditions were sent to the rural areas of Russia to protect landowners, kulaks and their property and, later, to mobilize the People's Army of Komuch (the "People's Army"). From June to August 1918, Komuch's influence spread from Samara into the provinces of Simbirsk, Kazan, Ufa and Saratov. In September, however, the People's Army suffered a number of defeats by the Soviet Red Army and withdrew from much of the territory. Komuch participated with the Provisional Siberian Government in the State Conference held in Ufa held between 8 and 23 September 1918.
|
|
His background had a great influence on his work. He was accepted to the Hungarian School of Film- and Theatrical Arts, but was expelled in 1952 because his family was blamed to be Kulaks. He took on different jobs, when--after a seven-year hiatus--he was again accepted to the film school in 1959. In the same year he made his first student film, a short entitled Játék (Game) about two prisoners playing chess with the shadow of their bars when the sun shines unto their cell.
|
|
Abadiyev was born over a decade before the October Revolution in the Ingush village of Nasyr-Kort. Having been born during the Russo-Japanese War, he was named "Yaponts", (meaning Japanese) due to the Ingush tradition of sometimes naming children with the ethnonyms of the peoples they fought in battle. After entering the Red Army in 1924 he was sent to cavalry school, where cadets participated in the liquidation of the kulaks. In 1930 he graduated from cavalry school and was stationed in the city of Vladikavkaz as a squadron commander.
|
|
During the Soviet period the Khanty were one of the few indigenous minorities of Siberia to be granted an autonomy in the form of an okrug (autonomous district). The establishment of autonomy has played a considerable role in consolidation of the ethnos (the Western Khants called their eastern neighbours Kantõk [the Other People]). However, in the 1930s concerted efforts were made by the Soviet state to collectivise them. The initial stages of this meant the execution of tribal chiefs, who were labelled "kulaks", followed by the execution of shamans.
|
|
Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes (prodrazverstka, prodnalog, and others) were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against (vaguely defined) "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33 (most especially the holodomor in Ukraine).
|
|
The film begins with the final moments of grandfather Semyon (Simon) Opanas beneath a pear tree.Philosophy, Iconology, Collectivization: Earth (1930) Next local kulaks, including Arkhyp Bilokin, contemplate the process of collectivization and declare their resistance to it, while elsewhere Semyon's grandson Vasyl (Basil) and his Komsomol friends also meet to discuss collectivization, although his father is skeptical. Later, Vasyl arrives with the community's first tractor to much excitement. After the men urinate in the overheated radiator, the peasants plow the land with the tractor and harvest the grain.
|
|
The first post-war years were marked by particularly dismal and sombre events in the fate of the Latvian nation. 120,000 Latvian inhabitants deemed disloyal by the Soviets were imprisoned or deported to Soviet concentration camps (the Gulag). Some managed to escape arrest and joined the Forest Brothers. On 25 March 1949, 43,000 mostly rural residents ("kulaks") and Latvian patriots were deported to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan in a sweeping repressive Operation Priboi, which was implemented in all three Baltic States and approved in Moscow already on 29 January 1949.
|
|
Villages had to agree to collectivization: some collectivization planners would hold endless meetings that would not end until villages joined; another tactic was through intimidation and coercion. Mass agricultural collectivization was largely supported by the middle and poor peasantry As the peasant class itself was divided into three groups: kulaks, wealthy; serednyak, middle; bednyak, poor. The middle and lower class supported collectivization, because it took private land from individual Kulak's, and distributed it among the serednyak and bednyak's villages. With the serednyak and bednyak joining collectivization they were also joining a kohloz.
|
|
The kulaks who were considered "counter- revolutionary" were executed or exiled, those who opposed collectivization were deported to remote regions and the rest were resettled to non-arable land in the same region. In the years following the agricultural collectivization, the reforms would disrupt the Soviet food supply. In turn, this disruption would eventually lead to famines for the many years following the first five- year plan, with 6-7 million dying from starvation in 1933. Although Stalin reported in 1930 that collectivization was aiding the country, this was the era of exaggeration.
|
|
The plan, overall, was to transition the Soviet Union from a weak, poorly controlled, agriculture state, into an industrial powerhouse. While the vision was grand, its planning was ineffective and unrealistic given the short amount of time given to meet the desired goals. In 1929, Stalin edited the plan to include the creation of "kolkhoz" collective farming systems that stretched over thousands of acres of land and had hundreds of thousands of peasants working on them. The creation of collective farms essentially destroyed the kulaks as a class (dekulakization).
|
|
Some of the communists converted back to the Church after such events. The Soviet propaganda countered these claims by claiming that they were tricks created by priests and kulaks to dupe people. The Sretenskaia church at the Sennoi marketplace in Kiev had two gold-plated domes that had for been completely tarnished after many years. These domes experienced a similar renovations one day when light shone so brightly from the domes that it was at first thought to be on fire, and a huge crowd gathered to see it with an atmosphere of religious euphoria.
|
|
In December 1927, the All-Union Communist Party held its Fifteenth Party Congress; prior to this Congress, the faction of the Party led by Stalin had supported the continuation of the New Economic Policy (NEP). However, in the cities, industry had become undercapitalized, and prices were rising. In the countryside, moreover, the NEP had resulted in an enrichment of certain privileged sections of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry (the Kulaks) because of deregulation of prices for grain. These events were leading to growing economic and political instability. The towns were being threatened with a "chronic danger of famine" in 1928-1929.
|
|
An insurgency continued, resisting Soviet rule via armed struggle for a number of years. The Forest brothers, as they were known, enjoyed the material support among the local population, as well as from the British (MI6), American, and Swedish secret intelligence services. On January 12, 1949, in an effort to end the insurgency, the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a decree "on the expulsion and deportation" from Baltic states of "all kulaks and their families, the families of bandits and nationalists", and others. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940-1953.
|
|
Stalin and his "centre" faction were allied with Bukharin and the Right Opposition from late 1924, with Bukharin elaborating Stalin's theory of Socialism in One Country. Together, they expelled Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev and the United Opposition from the Communist Party in December 1927. However, once Trotsky was out of the way and the Left Opposition had been illegalized, Stalin soon became alarmed at the danger posed to the Soviet state by the rising power of the capitalistic Kulaks and NEPmen, who had become emboldened by the Left Opposition's illegalization. Sensing this danger, Stalin then turned on his Right Opposition allies.
|
|
Lumans, p. 349 Most sources count 200,000 to 250,000 refugees leaving Latvia, with perhaps as many as 80,000 to 100,000 of them recaptured by the Soviets or, during few months immediately after the end of war,Lumans, pp. 384–385 returned by the West.Lumans, p. 391 The Soviets reoccupied the country in 1944–1945, and further deportations followed as the country was collectivised and Sovieticised. On 25 March 1949, 43,000 rural residents ("kulaks") and Latvian nationalists were deported to Siberia in a sweeping Operation Priboi in all three Baltic states, which was carefully planned and approved in Moscow already on 29 January 1949.
|
|
On August 18, another revolt broke out, led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Penza regional leaders were seen as not responding firmly enough against rebellion, which prompted Lenin to send several telegrams urging them to be more resolute in fighting against the rebels: "Essential to organise a reinforced guard of selected and reliable people, to carry out a campaign of ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and whiteguards; suspects to be shut up in a detention camp outside the city.""Telegram to Yevgenia Bosch", 9 August 1918. First published in published in 1924 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 3 (26).
|
|
On 19 August 1918, Lenin sent another telegram to Penza expressing exasperation and modifying his previous instructions:Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets in J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy's, p.77, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents (2007). Bedford/St Martin's: Boston and New York: p.77 > I am extremely indignant that there has been absolutely nothing definite > from you as to what serious measures have at last been carried out by you > for ruthless suppression of the kulaks of five volosts and confiscation of > their grain.
|
|
Special MGB representatives were dispatched to various local offices of MGB to form operative staff that would select the deportees and compile a file on each family. The information was gathered from many different sources, including republican MGB files on "nationalists", local MGB files on "bandits" (i.e. Forest Brothers), local executive committee files and tax records on "kulaks", border guard and navy files on emigrants. Since there was not enough time to investigate people's attitudes or activities during the German occupation, there were many contradictory cases where Communist activists were deported but Nazi collaborators were not.
|
|
Local MGB offices would prepare summary certificates for each family and send them for approval to the republican MGB office. For example, by 14 March, Estonian MGB approved summary certificates for 9,407 families (3,824 kulaks and 5,583 nationalists and bandits) which created a reserve of 1,907 families above the quota. Overall, due to the lack of time, the files on deportees were often incomplete or incorrect. Therefore, from April to June, retrospective corrections were made – new files were added for people deported but not on deportee lists and files of those who escaped deportations were removed.
|
|
But with policies of forced collectivisation and 'the liquidation of the kulaks as a class', tractors became even more important symbolically and practically - to increase output and to compensate for the widespread loss of horses which were slaughtered in peasant resistance to forced collectivisation. The building of the Kharkiv plant began in 1930 in fields outside of the city. The aim was a plant that would eventually make almost everything needed for a tractor from the iron and steel to the most complex parts. Building involved some 10,000 workers, 2000 horses, 90 million bricks, 160,000 tons of steel and 100,000 tons of iron.
|
|
Komsomol members seize "grain hidden by kulaks" In the summer of 1930, the Soviet government had instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. The same year Ukraine produced 27% of the Soviet harvest but provided 38% of the deliveries, and in 1931 it made 42% of the deliveries. Yet the Ukrainian harvest fell from 23.9 million tons to 18.3 million tons in 1931, but the previous year's quota of 7.7 million tons remained. Authorities were able to procure only 7.2 million tons, and in 1932 just 4.3 million tons of a reduced quota of 6.6 million tons.
|
|
He branded those who tried to re-open churches as "former kulaks" and "falsifiers of figures".Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 67. This report was contradicted, however, by the LMG's own figures (based on the 1937 census) that found perhaps half the country still held religious beliefs, even if they had no structures to worship in any longer and they could no longer openly express their beliefs.
|
|
Soviet officials had hoped that by sending the twenty-five thousanders to the countryside that they would be able to produce grain more rapidly. Their hopes were that key areas in the North Caucasus and Volga regions would be collectivized by 1931, and then the other regions by 1932.McCauley 2008 Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulaks and their "agents". Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture.
|
|
They "physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulaks, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock and led assaults on officials." Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet and setting fire to their homes.
|
|
The Soviet government resorted to the execution and mass deportation of defiant kulaks to Siberia in order to implement the plan. The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine, which was once called "The breadbasket of Europe". The immediate effects of forced collectivization were reduced grain output and almost halved livestock numbers, thus creating major famines throughout the USSR during 1932 and 1933. In 1932–1933, an estimated 11 million people, 3–7 million in Ukraine alone, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives (see: Holodomor) (although this has been disputed).
|
|
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents by Csaba Békés & Malcolm Byrne (Published by Central European University Press, 2002, , ), p. 375, para 4: "... the (Kádár) regime had to find an explanation for the revolution and collapse of the old regime in October 1956 ... they chose to interpret the uprising as a conspiracy by anti-communist, reactionary forces. This is why they labeled many ordinary citizens' actions as crimes. Critical opposition attitudes were described as "a plot to overthrow the people's democratic regime", and workers and peasants who took part in the revolt were called "jailbirds, ragamuffins, and kulaks.
|
|
The requisitioning efforts disincentived peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped. The policy caused controversy; at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, held in Moscow in July 1918, the SRs and Left SRs condemned the use of these armed detachments to procure grain. Realising that the Committees of Poor Peasants had turned upon the 'Middle Peasants' who were not kulaks and that they had contributed to the peasantry's increased alienation from the government, in December 1918 Lenin declared their abolition. He also called upon those workers who lacked discipline to be punished accordingly.
|
|
Nikolay Shchors was born in the village of Snovsk of Gorodnya uyezd (Chernigov Governorate) into a family of kulaks. His father Aleksandr Nikolayevich, a locomotive engineer, according to the official Soviet historiography, arrived from a town of Stowbtsy (Minsk Governorate) "in search of better life" to Snovsk where he was able to build his own house (since August 1939 – a memorial museum). Nikolay Shchors was the oldest child amongst his other siblings: Konstantin (1896–1979), Akulina (1898–1937), Yekaterina (1900–1984), Olga (1900–1985). Shchors City official website In 1905 Nikolai enrolled into a parish church school.
|
|
Although everyone attended the same churches, there was a separate entrance for the noblemen and their families, which led to a raised enclosure reserved for them. She also witnessed the miserable conditions of the peasantry, living in poverty, ignorance and filth from the cradle to the grave under the interlocking power of the landlords, the orthodox church and the Tsar. They lived upon small strips of land which was insufficient to support them. They often were forced to work an allotted number of days on the vast estates of the wealthy landowners or for Kulaks (rich peasants).
|
|
This was usually promoted and sped up by propaganda aimed at creating a common way of life in all states within the Soviet sphere of influence. In many cases, Sovietization was also accompanied by forced resettlement of large categories of "class enemies" (kulaks, or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labor camps and exile settlements. In a narrow sense, the term Sovietization is often applied to mental and social changes within the population of the Soviet Union and its satellites which led to creation of the new Soviet man (according to its supporters) or Homo Sovieticus (according to its critics).
|
|
Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – a Soviet Spymaster (Warner Books, 1995) p. 299. Despite his background, he survived the wholesale arrests of 'kulaks' instigated by Josif Stalin, and by about 1931 was working as bookkeeper on a collective farm in the Urals. His next break came after Nikolai Yezhov ordered the mass arrest of NKVD officers suspected of loyalty to his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda in 1937, when Ryumin joined the NKVD as a bookkeeper. He worked for SMERSH during the war, and in 1948 was transferred to the Department for Specially Important Cases, within the MGB.
|
|
Refuge in Australia for the Russian colony in China was negotiated by archbishop John of Shanghai. His success in negotiations with the Labor Government of Ben Chifley is sometimes seen as a miracle proving John's sainthood. Several Russian born emigrants to Australia have published accounts of their escapes from Soviet Russia and Communist China, including Alex Saranin's 'Child of the Kulaks' and 'The Tarasov Saga' by Igor Ivashkoff (Gary Nash). Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional Government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917, lived in Brisbane in 1945-6 with the family of his terminally ill wife.
|
|
Replying to the interviewer's question about whether he thought the Holocaust was unique, Hillgruber stated: > ...that the mass murder of the kulaks in the early 1930s, the mass murder of > the leadership cadre of the Red Army in 1937-38, and the mass murder of the > Polish officers who in September 1939 fell into Soviet hands are not > qualitatively different in evaluation from the mass murder in the Third > Reich.Hillgruber, Andreas, "No Questions are Forbidden to Research" pp. > 155–161 from Forever In The Shadow Of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, > Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993, p. 157.
|
|
As a result, cereal crops were heavily affected by the 1931 drought. During winter and spring of 1930–31, the Ukrainian agricultural authority "Narkomzem" Ukrainian SRR issued several reports about the significant decline of livestock and especially draft-animal power caused by poor treatment, absence of forage, stables/farms and due to the "kulaks sabotage". According to the first five-year plan, Ukrainian agriculture was to switch from an exclusive orientation of grain to a more diverse output. This included not only a rise in sugar beet crops, but also other types of agricultural production were expected to be utilised by industry (with even cotton plants being established in 1931).
|
|
In Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, Jasper Becker notes that Mao was dismissive of reports he received of food shortages in the countryside and refused to change course, believing that peasants were lying and that rightists and kulaks were hoarding grain. He refused to open state granaries, and instead launched a series of "anti-grain concealment" drives that resulted in numerous purges and suicides. Other violent campaigns followed in which party leaders went from village to village in search of hidden food reserves, and not only grain, as Mao issued quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks and eggs. Many peasants accused of hiding food were tortured and beaten to death.
|
|
The Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) quickly realised the problem, and began to reform the dekulakisation process. To help prevent the mass escapes the OGPU started to recruit people within the colony to help stop people who attempted to leave, and set up ambushes around known popular escape routes. The OGPU also attempted to raise the living conditions in these camps that would not encourage people to actively try and escape, and Kulaks were promised that they would regain their rights after five years. Even these revisions ultimately failed to resolve the problem, and the dekulakisation process was a failure in providing the government with a steady forced labor force.
|
|
The representative of the Soviet refuses to help Yelena against the Bey; although he has received posters calling on people to expel the kulaks from the collective farms, his only comment is that the posters "look pretty". Undaunted, Yelena takes her lessons to the children working with the sheep. The Bey, however, has illegally sold the sheep to some sheep traders, who begin to slaughter the animals. Yelena declares that she will travel to the regional centre to find out about Soviet regulations concerning dealings in sheep, but on the way she is thrown off a sled by one of the sheep traders and becomes lost in a snowstorm.
|
|
Tolstoyans had problems with the Tsarist regimes, and even more so with the Bolshevik ones. By 1930, many Tolstoyans had to relocate to Siberia to avoid being liquidated as kulaks, but Stalinist police nevertheless arrested them, disbanded their settlements (such as the Life and Labor Commune which was converted into a state-owned collective farm in 1937) and sent them to labor camps between 1936 and 1939. The Russian anarchist Volin was living in the Marseille area during the Vichy France period. Even though he was under police surveillance, he was able to evade the authorities in order to participate in the work of the group.
|
|
The Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party decided in September 1948 to collectivize Polish farms, acting on the June 20, 1948 Bucharest resolution of the Cominform, which stipulated that collectivization should start in all Communist countries.CENA WYGRANEJ, Biuletyn IPN - nr 1/2002 In July 1948, during a Politburo meeting, the Minister of Industry and Commerce, Hilary Minc, gave a speech on private ownership in the Polish economy. Referring to Lenin's notion of the "permanent rebirth of capitalism", Minc announced the transformation of the Polish economy into a socialist one. The process of restructuring Polish agriculture was officially presented as protection for small farmers, whose position the rich kulaks allegedly endangered.
|
|
By 1932, 61% of peasant households belonged to Kolkhozes, although the transition was far from smooth—peasants actively resisted in a number of ways, including the slaughter of livestock. While this increased the available grain, as the animals did not need to be fed, it drastically reduced the amount of meat, dairy and leather from the countryside. As it was easier for officials to seize grain from the collectivized farms, these farms ended up contributing a disproportionate amount of grain on the market in the early 1930s. At least 6 million kulaks were starved to death by the deliberate policy of the communist state.
|
|
Douglas Tottle is mostly known for his controversial book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard in which he argues that claims that Holodomor was an intentional genocide are "fraudulent" and "a creation of Nazi propagandists". Tottle argues that the major cause of the famine was the weather conditions, drought especially and suggests that greater blame can actually be placed on kulaks sabotage and hoarding of grain. In addition, Tottle puts significant emphasis into claiming the invalidity of existing photographic evidence. Tottle writes that he is more interested in the "Nazi and fascist connections" and the "coverups of wartime collaboration" (p. 3).
|
|
This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non- Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected at least 6 million people. Of this total, 1.8 million kulaks were deported in 1930–31, 1.0 million peasants and ethnic minorities in 1932–39, whereas about 3.5 million ethnic minorities were further resettled during 1940–52. Soviet archives documented 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported to forced settlements during the 1940s; however, Nicolas Werth places overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations.
|
|
When the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers and lead to increased production. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulaks, who withheld surpluses of agricultural produce.
|
|
Most of the first arrivals were kulaks, other agricultural workers, and people from southern Russian cities. The arrival of so many deportees panicked Tomsk authorities, who viewed them as "starving and contagious." pp. 86-92 A report by Vassily Arsenievich Velichko, the local Communist Party head in Narymsky District of the West Siberian Krai, gave twenty-two examples of people who had been deported: Murom railway station A rail convoy holding déclassé deportees left Moscow on April 30, and a similar convoy left Leningrad on April 29, with both arriving on May 10. The daily food ration during the trip was 300 grams (10 oz) of bread per person.
|
|
Between 1874 and 1880, of the approximately 45,000 Mennonites in Ukraine, ten thousand departed for the United States (mostly to California) and eight thousand for Manitoba, Canada. During the Ukrainian Civil War, a number of Ukrainian Mennonites died at the hands of anarcho-communist makhnovites. During the Soviet period, many Mennonites were persecuted, sent into exile as "kulaks", imprisoned and executed as "enemies of the people", and suffered from hunger and diseases.Crimes of Communism against Ukraine and its people, ArtUkraine site Between eight and nine thousand Mennonite men were arrested during the Great Terror, which began in autumn 1936 and ended by late 1938.
|
|
The Soviet Union lagged behind the industrial development of Western countries, and there had been a shortfall of grain; 1927 produced only 70% of grain produced in 1926. Stalin's government feared attack from Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Romania. Many Communists, including in Komsomol, OGPU, and the Red Army, were eager to be rid of the NEP and its market-oriented approach; they had concerns about those who profited from the policy: affluent peasants known as "kulaks" and the small business owners or "Nepmen". At this point, Stalin turned against the NEP, putting him on a course to the "left" even of Trotsky or Zinoviev.
|
|
Millions of Volga Germans, Chechens, Ukrainians, Koreans and other ethnic minorities, along with other marginalized subjects (former kulaks, members of the aristocracy, families of convicted "enemies of the people," etc.) were forced to relocate to Kazakhstan, many of whom settled in Dzhambul. Some were evacuated to Kazakhstan, and to Dzhambul, during WWII from the areas that were, or were feared to come, under German occupation. The city's population continued to grow throughout the 1960s and 1970s in spite of the end of exiles, due to an industrial spurt the city received during that time. As a result, Dzhambul had a highly diverse population composed of multiple ethnic groups, the largest being the Russians, followed by the Kazakhs.
|
|
Germans, however, comprised the single largest foreign-origin minority sent into internal exile in the Soviet Union. There appeared to have been a deep prejudice against German communities because many Soviet officials considered all German farmers kulaks. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Soviet leadership decided to label all ethnic Germans from Russia as enemies of the USSR, and accused them of collaborating with Nazis, most were arrested, even killed or deported into labour camps. The Supreme Soviet decreed the first evacuations, which were really expulsions, as the inhabitants were never allowed to return. Action to deport every ethnic German from the Crimea began on 15 August 1941.
|
|
The man-made Famine of 1932–33, the deportations of the so-called kulaks, the physical annihilation of the nationally conscious intelligentsia, and terror in general were used to destroy and subdue the Ukrainian nation. Even after Joseph Stalin's death the concept of a Russified though multiethnic Soviet people was officially promoted, according to which the non-Russian nations were relegated to second- class status. Despite this, many Ukrainians played prominent roles in the Soviet Union, including such public figures as Semyon Timoshenko. The creation of a sovereign and independent Ukraine in 1991, however, pointed to the failure of the policy of the "merging of nations" and to the enduring strength of the Ukrainian national consciousness.
|
|
Pages of internal passport, issued in 1910 in Imperial Russia The internal passport system of the Russian Empire was abandoned after the October Revolution in 1917, lifting most limitations upon internal movements of members of labouring classes in Soviet Russia. Labour booklets became the principal means of personal identification. In 1932, the "passport regime" was reintroduced, its declared purpose to improve the registration of population and "relieve" major industrial cities and other sensitive localities of "hiding kulaks and dangerous political elements" and those "not engaged in labor of social usefulness". The "passportization" process developed gradually involving factories, large, medium, and small cities, settlements, and rural areas, and finally became universal by the mid-1970s.
|
|
For anti-communist academic Richard Pipes, the tendency to "merge political and economic power" is "implicit in socialism" and authoritarianism is "virtually inevitable". According to the Hungarian- born political sociologist and communist-studies scholar Paul Hollander, a critic of communism and left-wing politics in general,. egalitarianism was one of the features of authoritarian socialist states that was so attractive to Western intellectuals that they quietly justified their authoritarianism and the murder of millions of capitalists, landowners and supposedly wealthy kulaks in order to achieve this equality. According to Walter Scheidel, authoritarian socialists who have supported equality were correct to the extent that historically only violent shocks have resulted in major reductions in economic inequality.
|
|
The film therefore set out to address three key areas of political concern: the promotion of education, the elimination of the kulaks, and the introduction of advanced technology. Another key element was realism, which comes through in the use of the actress's real name for the main character, and in the ethnographic detail with which the lives of the villagers is depicted. The plot was inspired in part by two newspaper stories about teachers in peril: one who committed suicide, and one who was airlifted to safety. Altai nature and sounds of vargan, fragment of the film The film was shot on location in Leningrad and, over a period of seven months, in the Altai mountains of Kazakhstan.
|
|
The opening of the Riga–Daugavpils Railway in 1861 led to the expansion of the town around the railway station Ringmundhofa later named Rembate. The town was entirely destroyed in World War I but was swiftly rebuilt after Latvia achieved independence. After the occupation of Latvia and its incorporation into the Soviet Union as the Latvian SSR, Edgars Kauliņš (1903–1979), the local Communist Party secretary, was able to save all of the farmers in the district from deportation during the period of forced collectivization, declaring that there were no kulaks in the area and he would rather be deported himself. In 1948 Kauliņš became the founding chairman of the kolkhoz Lāčplēsis ("The Bear Slayer"), now part of Lielvārde.
|
|
By December, Andreyev had committed the regional party to a target of complete collectivisation by the spring 1931. In January 1930, he announced that they had been too modest, and would complete the process during that year. As part of the process, the North Caucasus OGPU was set a quota of 6,000-8,000 'kulaks' to be arrested and executed, and 20,000 to be deported to remote parts of the USSR. By February, 80 per cent of the rural population of the North Caucasus had been herded onto collective farms, but the result was armed rebellion by thousands of peasants, which was put down by the Red Army, and which forced a partial retreat by the authorities.
|
|
The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) targeted kulaks, who owned a little land. Stalin took control of the Comintern and introduced a policy in the international organisation of opposing all leftists who were not Marxist–Leninists, labelling them to be social-fascists, although many communists such as Jules Humbert-Droz disagreed with him on this policy, believing that the left should unite against the rise of right-wing movements like fascism across Europe.Service (2007:167) In the early 1930s, Stalin reversed course and promoted popular front movements whereby communist parties would collaborate with socialists and other political forces. A high priority was mobilizing wide support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
|
|
When it became clear that the 1932 grain deliveries were not going to meet the expectations of the government, the decreased agricultural output was first blamed on the kulaks, and later on agents and spies of foreign intelligence services, "nationalists", "Petlurovites", and from 1937 on, Trotskyists. According to a report from the head of the Supreme Court, by January 15, 1933 as many as 103,000 people (more than 14 thousand in the Ukrainian SSR) had been sentenced under the provisions of the August 7 decree. Of the 79,000 whose sentences were known to the Supreme Court, 4,880 had been sentenced to death, 26,086 to ten years of imprisonment, and 48,094 to other punishments.
|
|
Among them 41,898 people were executed. ;July 27: NKVD Directive On purging the Military Intelligence Department of the Red Army ;July 29: NKVD Directive On purging railroad workers of socially harmful elements ;July 31: NKVD operative order 00447 «Об операции по репрессированию бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов» (The operation for repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements) is approved by the Politburo. Originally the operation was planned for four months; the plan was for 75,950 people to be executed and an additional 193,000 to be sent to the GULAG. The operation was extended multiple times. Altogether, through the summer of 1938, at least 818,000 people were arrested and not less than 436,000 were executed.
|
|
The order decreed that every Soviet citizen who had ever worked for the embassies and consulates of Germany, Japan, Italy or Poland was to be arrested. ;October 12-November 5: NKVD instruction ordering Operative defeat of Anti-Soviet Church and sectarian actives. ;November 3: NKVD instruction for stepping up the mass operations (against kulaks, ethnic people and family members of traitors). ;November 4: NKVD instruction for stepping up the work among Gypsies. ;November 30: NKVD instruction for the Mass operation against Latvian spies: 21,300 people were arrested; among them 16,575 were executed. ;December 11: NKVD instruction (directive No 50215) for the Mass operation against Greeks: 12,557 people arrested; among them 10,545 were executed.
|
|
It also dropped rapidly in the Eastern Bloc after the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Similarly, inequality went back up after the collapse of the Soviet system. According to Paul Hollander, this was one of the features of communist states that was so attractive to egalitarian Western intellectuals that they quietly justified the murder of millions of capitalists, landowners and supposedly wealthy kulaks in order to achieve this equality. According to Walter Scheidel, they were correct to the extent that historically only violent shocks have resulted in major reductions in economic inequality. Marxist–Leninists respond to this type of criticism by highlighting the ideological differences in the concept of freedom and liberty.
|
|
The labor camps were expanded into the infamous Gulag system under Stalin in his war against so-called "class enemies". Stalin also undertook massive resettlements of Kulaks, similarly to the Tsarist penal system of ssylka (resettlement in remote areas) which had been established to deal with political dissidents and common criminals without executing them. As Stalin consolidated his rule the party itself ceased to be a serious deliberative body under Stalin with Party Congresses, particularly after the Great Purge, being little more than show pieces in which delegates would sing the praises of Stalin in what became a cult of personality. No party congresses were held at all between 1939 and 1952.
|
|
Initially families of kulaks were deported into remote areas "for special settlement" without particular care about their occupation. In 1931–1932 the problems of dekulakization and territorial planning of the exile settlement were handled by a special Politburo commission known as the Andreev-Rudzutak Commission (комиссия Андреева-Рудзутака), named after Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev and Yan Rudzutak. The plan to achieve goals like exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas with "special settlements" instead of labor camps was dropped after the revelation of the Nazino affair in 1933; subsequently the Gulag system was expanded. The notions of "labor settlement"/"labor settlers" were introduced in 1934 and were in official use until 1945.
|
|
The mass deportation of the Germans was based on social and ethnic criteria, the German Russian settlements probably suffered more than any other communities. About 1.2 percent of the Soviet population was classified as kulak and deported to the Gulag (slave labour camps), based on a total Soviet population of 147 million, according to the 1926 census. The number of ethnic Germans sent to the camps as kulaks was about 50,000 out of a German population in the Soviet Union at the time of the same census of 1.239 million, that is, about 4 percent of the German population. The Germans were not the only ethnic group deported in large numbers during the collectivization drive, as many ethnic Poles also suffered the same fate.
|
|
After two large deportations in May 1948 (code name Vesna) and in March 1949 (code name Priboi), the progress of collectivisation in the Lithuanian SSR jumped from 3.9% in January 1949 to 60.5% in January 1950. However, the pace of collectivization in Lithuania was still not as rapid as in Latvia or Estonia, where 93% and 80% of the farms were collectivized by the end of 1949. Soviet authorities, striving to complete the forced collectivisation in Lithuania, initiated preparations for a mass deportation of peasants who refused to join newly established kolkhozes. On September 5, 1951, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union issued a decree number 3309-1568cc "On the deportation of kulaks and their families from the Lithuanian territory".
|
|
Other Soviet penal-labor systems not formally included in the GULag were: (a) camps for prisoners of war captured by the Soviet Union, administered by GUPVI; (b) filtration camps set up during World War II for the temporary detention of Soviet Ostarbeiters and prisoners of war while the security organs screened them in order to "filter out" the black sheep; (c) "special settlements" for internal exiles including "kulaks" and deported ethnic minorities, such as Volga Germans, Poles, Balts, Caucasians, Crimean Tartars, and others. During certain periods of Soviet history, each of these camp systems held millions of people. Many hundreds of thousands were also sentenced to forced labor without imprisonment at their normal places of work. (Applebaum, pp. 579–80).
|
|
A "Blackboard" published in the newspaper "Under the Flag of Lenin" in January 1933 — a "blacklist" identifying specific kolhozes and their punishment in the Bashtanka Raion, Mykolayiv oblast, Ukraine. Black boards — synonymous with "boards of infamy", were an element of agitation-propaganda in the Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine in the 1930s, coinciding with the Holodomor, the artificial famine imposed by the Soviet regime as part of a policy of repression. The policy was part of the collectivization process and the fight with kulaks (kurkuls). The "black boards" were installed at entrances to a settlement and identified the residents that were accused of counter- revolutionary activity and who were the enemies of the people, allegedly trying to undermine the process of collectivization.
|
|
The class enemy was a pervasive feature of Soviet propaganda.Lewis Stegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism As A Way Of Life, p12 With the civil war, the newly formed army moved to massacre large numbers of kulaks and otherwise promulgate a short lived "reign of terror" to terrify the masses into obedience.Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia, from Nicholas II to Putin p 108 Lenin proclaimed that they were exterminating the bourgeois as a class, a position reinforced by the many actions against landlords, well-off peasants, banks, factories, and private shops.Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, p12 Stalin warned, often, that with the struggle to build a socialist society, the class struggle would sharpen as class enemies grew more desperate.
|
|
In the 1920s, much Soviet propaganda for the outside world was aimed at capitalist countries as plutocracies, and claiming that they intended to destroy the Soviet Union as the workers' paradise. Capitalism, being responsible for the ills of the world, therefore was fundamentally immoral.Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p299 Fascism was presented as a terroristic outburst of finance capitial, and drawing from the petit bourgeoisie, and the middling peasants, equivalent to kulaks, who were the losers in the historical process.R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy, p134 During the early stages of World War II, it was overtly presented as a war between capitalists, which would weaken them and allow Communist triumph as long as the Soviet Union wisely stayed out.
|
|
The scope of this law, colloquially dubbed the "law of the wheat ears", included even the smallest appropriation of grain by peasants for personal use. In little over a month, the law was revised, as Politburo protocols revealed that secret decisions had later modified the original decree of September 16, 1932. The Politburo approved a measure that specifically exempted small-scale theft of socialist property from the death penalty, declaring that "organizations and groupings destroying state, social, and co-operate property in an organized manner by fires, explosions and mass destruction of property shall be sentenced to execution without trial", and listed a number of cases in which "kulaks, former traders and other socially-alien persons" would be subject to the death penalty.
|
|
Further migrations of these Mennonites led to settlements in Brazil, Uruguay, Belize, Bolivia and Argentina. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Mennonites in Russia owned large agricultural estates and some had become successful as industrial entrepreneurs in the cities, employing wage labor. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War (1917–1921), all of these farms (whose owners were called Kulaks) and enterprises were expropriated by local peasants or the Soviet government. Beyond expropriation, Mennonites suffered severe persecution during the course of the Civil War, at the hands of workers, the Bolsheviks and, particularly, the Anarcho-Communists of Nestor Makhno, who considered the Mennonites to be privileged foreigners of the upper class and targeted them.
|
|
Russians of Kazakhstan together with other ethnic groups of the region suffered heavily during the Russian Civil War and Collectivisation in the USSR and endured repeated famines and unrest. In 1918-1931 Basmachi Revolt affected areas of southern Kazakh SSR often taking a form of an ethnic conflict between Russian and Ukrainian farmers and native Muslim nomads. Thousands of Russian settlers are thought to have been killed by the Kazakhs in the violence and this was followed by equally bloody reprisals against the nomadic population by the Red Army. In the 1920s and the 1930s, some Russians in Kazakhstan felt discriminated against by Communist authorities who promoted Kazakh language and culture in the region and targeted many local ethnic Russians as either kulaks or Cossacks.
|
|
Furthermore, collectivization involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short time frame, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in the village obshchina or mir. The changes were even more dramatic in other places, such as in Ukraine, with its tradition of individual farming, in the Soviet republics of Central Asia, and in the trans-Volga steppes, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance but of pride as well.YCLers seizing grain from "kulaks" which was hidden in the graveyard, Ukraine Some peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world.Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–12.
|
|
96 The thrust of the Pravda criticism was in terms of morality; it condemned the opera's sympathetic portrayal of the eponymous character, an adulteress and murderess. At the time, the composer justified the sympathetic portrayal of Katerina in Soviet terms, saying she was a victim of the circumstances of oppressive, pre-revolutionary Russia. This criticism was revived in a different way by Richard Taruskin in a 1989 article, where he interprets the work in the context of Stalin's campaign against the kulaks in 1930, considering its portrayal of the killings of Katerina's kulak in-laws as "a justification of genocide". Daniil Zhitomirsky accuses the work of "primitive satire" in its treatment of the priest and police, but acknowledges the "incredible force" of the last scene.
|
|
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovschina ('period of Yezhov'),In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (lit. 'Yezhov phenomenon'), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union that occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale repression of wealthy peasants (kulaks); genocidal acts against ethnic minorities; a purge of the Communist Party, government officials, and the Red Army leadership; widespread police surveillance; suspicion of saboteurs; counter-revolutionaries; imprisonment; and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.
|
|
After the Soviet re- invasion, the Baltic countries remainedThe Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Postcommunist States and Nations) David J. Smith from Front Matter Estonia: Identity and Independence: Jean-Jacques Subrenat, David Cousins, Alexander Harding, Richard C. Waterhouse on Page 246. the Soviet Socialist Republics of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.Lieven, Anatol, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence, Yale University Press, 1993, , page 61 & 94 On 12 January 1949 the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a decree "on the expulsion and deportation" from Baltic states of "all kulaks and their families, the families of bandits and nationalists", and others.Stephane Courtois; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999).
|
|
Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, p. 18. Syrtsov was found to be an effective ally of Moscow in the exertion of coercion against the peasantry in what came to be known as the Ural-Siberian method of grain procurement, which was based upon use of Article 107 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in charging peasants as "speculatorsa" for refusing to sell grain to state authorities despite the inadequate purchase prices being offered. In the aftermath of the so-called "extraordinary measures" employed the 1928 grain procurement Syrtsov was a consistent supporter of Stalin's proposal for "total collectivization" and the "liquidation of kulaks as a class" in the Siberian Oblast Committee of the VKP(b) as a long-term solution to the problem of inadequate state grain collections.
|
|
They often used the term to label anyone who had more property than was considered "normal," according to subjective criteria, and personal rivalries played a part in the classification of enemies. Historian Robert Conquest argues: During the summer of 1918, Moscow sent armed detachments to the villages to seize grain. Any peasant who resisted was labeled a kulak: "The Communists declared war on the rural population for two purposes: to extract food for the cities and the Red Army and to insinuate their authority into the countryside, which remained largely unaffected by the Bolshevik coup." A large-scale revolt ensued, and it was during this period, in August 1918, that Lenin sent a directive: > Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known > kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
|
|
The church was treated as a private enterprise and clergy qualified as kulaks for taxation purposes, and they were subject to the same oppressive taxation that was introduced for private peasants and shopkeepers (up to 81% of income). The lack of regulations that defined how such should be assessed allowed for arbitrary assessments and financial persecution. The rural clergy were required to pay the full tax on land use, along with tax on income received for special clerical functions as well as a special tax paid by those deprived of voting rights (all clergy were in this category). All church communities were required to pay a special tax on the leased church building at 0.5% of the "market" value of the building, which would be arbitrarily assessed by the State Insurance Office.
|
|
Along with other territories inhabited by Ukrainians, the Donbass was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the aftermath of the 1917–22 Russian Civil War. Ukrainians in the Donbass were greatly affected by the 1932–33 Holodomor famine and the Russification policy of Joseph Stalin. As most ethnic Ukrainians were rural peasant farmers (called "kulaks" by the Soviet regime), they bore the brunt of the famine. According to the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, the population of the area that is now Luhansk Oblast declined by 25% as a result of the famine, whereas it declined by 15–20% in the area that is now Donetsk Oblast. According to one estimate, 81.3% of those who died during the famine in the Ukrainian SSR were ethnic Ukrainians, whilst only 4.5% were ethnic Russians.
|
|
After immediately entering communication with the surviving Sisters of the congregation, Mother Catherine was arrested, along with 24 other Catholics, in August 1933. In what the NKVD called "The Case of the Counterrevolutionary Terrorist-Monarchist Organization", Mother Catherine stood accused of plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin, overthrow the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and restore the House of Romanov as a constitutional monarchy in concert with "international fascism" and "Papal theocracy". It was further alleged that the organization planned for the restoration of Capitalism and for collective farms to be broken up and returned to their former owners among the Russian nobility and the kulaks. The NKVD alleged that the organization was directed by Pope Pius XI, Bishop Pie Neveu, and the Vatican's Congregation for Eastern Churches.
|
|
During the collectivization period in the Baltic republics, on 29 January 1949, the Council of Ministers issued top secret decree No. 390–138ss,Постановление Совета Министров СССР от 29 января 1949 г. №390-138сс «О выселении с территории Литвы, Латвии и Эстонии кулаков с семьями, семей бандитов и националистов, находящихся на нелегальном положении, убитых при вооруженных столкновениях и осужденных, легализованных бандитов, продолжающих вести вражескую работу, и их семей, а также семей репрессированных пособников бандитов». which obligated the Ministry for State Security (MGB) to exile the kulaks and the people's enemies from the three Baltic Republics forever. In the early morning of 25 March 1949, the second major wave of deportation from the Baltic Republics, operation "Priboi", carried out by MGB began, which was planned to affect 30,000 in Estonia, including peasants.
|
|
Augstein wrote in opposition to Nolte that: > Not for nothing did Nolte let us know that the annihilation of the kulaks, > the peasant middle class, had taken place from 1927 to 1930, before Hitler > seized power, and that the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks and countless > other victims of Stalin's insanity had happened between 1934 and 1938, > before the beginning of Hitler's war. But Stalin's insanity was, in contrast > to Hitler's insanity, a realist's insanity. After all this drivel comes one > thing worth discussing: whether Stalin pumped up Hitler and whether Hitler > pumped up Stalin. This can be discussed, but the discussion does not address > the issue. It is indeed possible that Stalin was pleased by how Hitler > treated his bosom buddy Ernst Röhm and the entire SA leadership in 1934.
|
|
Ana Pauker was recast by Romania's leaders in the official party history as having been a staunch ultra-orthodox Stalinist, even though she had opposed or had attempted to moderate a number of Stalinist policies while she was in a leadership position. As the historian Robert Levy concluded: "No other communist leader save Tito has been shown to have resisted the Soviet-imposed line [during the Cominform period of "high Stalinism"] as she did—whether on collectivisation, the fight against the kulaks and the urban bourgeoise, the prosecution of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, the purge of the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance veterans, the dimensions of the Five-Year Plan, the staging of a show trial of Romanian Zionists, or the facilitation of mass Jewish emigration".Levy, pp. 233–234.
|
|
On 31 July 1937, the NKVD issued Decree No. 00447 "On the operation of repressing former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements." and the political repression that followed resulted in large death sentence and execution quotas. Local cemeteries in Moscow were unable to accommodate the sheer volume of purge victims executed in area prisons. To address the issue, the NKVD allocated two new special facilities - Butovo and Kommunarka shooting ground - to serve as a combination of execution site and mass grave. On 8 August 1937, the first 91 victims were transported to Butovo from Moscow prisons. Over the next 14 months, 20,761 were executed and subsequently buried at the site, with another 10,000 to 14,000 shot and buried at the nearby Kommunarka Firing Range located to the northwest.
|
|
The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants—especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. A series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being "fifth- column" communities. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage, by the Polish Military Organisation and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin. According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", and to historian Robert Conquest, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained through torture, and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes.
|
|
The Politburo approved a measure that specifically exempted small-scale theft of socialist property from the death penalty, declaring that "organizations and groupings destroying state, social, and co-operate property in an organized manner by fires, explosions and mass destruction of property shall be sentenced to execution without trial", and listed a number of cases in which "kulaks, former traders, and other socially-alien persons" would be subject to the death penalty. "Working individual peasants and collective farmers" who stole kolkhoz property and grain would be sentenced to ten years; the death penalty would be imposed only for "systematic theft of grain, sugar beets, animals, etc."Davies and Wheatcroft, pp.167-168, 198-203 Soviet expectations for the 1932 grain crop were high because of Ukraine's bumper crop the previous year, which Soviet authorities believed were sustainable.
|
|
The plans allegedly involved, as was later discovered in a document written in Timișoara in 1956, the "purification of the Banat": the ethnic cleansing of Banat Germans, Banat Serbs, Banat CroatsGlasnik HDZ, 1991 and Banat Bulgarians. Additionally, the plans involved the expulsion of members of several social categories considered dangerous by the Romanian Communist Party. Among the targets were farmers with large holdings (known as chiaburi, and roughly equivalent to the Soviet kulaks), wealthy landowners, industrialists, innkeepers and restaurant owners, Bessarabian and Macedonian refugees, former members of the Wehrmacht, foreign citizens, relatives of the refugees, Titoist sympathizers, wartime collaborators of Nazi Germany (see Romania during World War II), Romanian Army employees, fired civil servants, relatives of counter-revolutionaries and all who had supported them, political and civic rights activists, former businessmen with Western ties, and leaders of the ethnic German community.
|
|
Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Alexander Kosarev and Vyacheslav Molotov on the 7th Conference of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol). Jul 1932 Kaganovich (together with Vyacheslav Molotov) participated with the All-Ukrainian Party Conference of 1930 and were given the task of implementation of the collectivization policy that caused a catastrophic 1932–33 famine (known as the Holodomor in Ukraine). Similar policies also inflicted enormous suffering on the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, the Kuban region, Crimea, the lower Volga region, and other parts of the Soviet Union. As an emissary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Kaganovich traveled to Ukraine, the central regions of the USSR, the Northern Caucasus, and Siberia demanding the acceleration of collectivization and repressions against the Kulaks, who were generally blamed for the slow progress of collectivization.
|
|
The totalitarian system, unified and organized, presents itself like a body, the "social body": "dictatorship, bureaucracy and apparatus need a new system of bodies". Lefort returns to the theories of Ernst Kantorowicz on the "two bodies of the king", in which the person of the totalitarian leader, besides his physical and mortal body, is a political body representing the one-people. In order to ensure its proper functioning and to maintain its unity, the totalitarian system requires an Other, "the evil other", a representation of the exterior, the enemy, against which the party combats, "the representative of the forces of the old society (kulaks, bourgeois), [...] the emissary of the stranger, of the imperialistic world". The division between the interior and the exterior, between the One-people and the Other, is the only division that totalitarianism tolerates, since it is founded upon this division.
|
|
A resolution was then adopted calling for a milder line on the kulaks; while Lominadze criticized forced, rapid collectivization, he was careful not to question the general line of the party. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June–July 1930, however, Lominadze "spoke forcefully, criticizing the positions of other Communists, and when he finished, his speech was one of the few not greeted by applause."Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, p. 251. In the same year, he and the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, S.I. Syrtsov, met to discuss political matters, agreeing that industrialization was being pushed too rapidly and the peasantry was under excessive pressure; this was considered the creation of a "left-right bloc," and he was dismissed from his post and removed from the Central Committee on December 1, 1930.
|
|
Katz, Steven The Holocaust in Historical Context Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 pp. 23–24 A common line of criticism were that Nazi crimes, above all the Holocaust, were singularly and uniquely evil, and could not be compared to the crimes of others. Some historians such as Hans- Ulrich Wehler were most forceful in arguing that the sufferings of the “kulaks” deported during the Soviet “dekulakization” campaign of the early 1930s were in no way analogous to the suffering of the Jews deported in the early 1940s. Many were angered by Nolte's claim that "the so-called annihilation of the Jews under the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original", with many such as Ian Kershaw wondering why Nolte spoke of the "so-called annihilation of the Jews" in describing the Holocaust.
|
|
Along with other territories inhabited by Ukrainians, the Donbass was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War. Cossacks in the region were subjected to decossackisation during 1919–1921. Ukrainians in the Donbass were greatly affected by the 1932–33 Holodomor famine and the Russification policy of Joseph Stalin. As most ethnic Ukrainians were rural peasant farmers (called "kulaks" by the Soviet regime), they bore the brunt of the famine. According to the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, the population of the area that is now Luhansk Oblast declined by 25% as a result of the famine, whereas it declined by 15–20% in the area that is now Donetsk Oblast. According to one estimate, 81.3% of those who died during the famine in the Ukrainian SSR were ethnic Ukrainians, whilst only 4.5% were ethnic Russians.
|
|
From 1938 to 1949 Nikita Khrushchev was the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CP[b]U), which means that he played the role of a governor for Joseph Stalin in Moscow, who was head of state of the Soviet Union and who held massive sway over domestic policy. During a brief period between February and December 1947, Lazar Kaganovich stood in for Khrushchev due to what was claimed to be an illness. Khrushchev had been a long time close associate of Lazar Kaganovich who was the head of the CP(b)U from 1925 to 1928. During that time Kaganovich had been responsible for implementing collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and was involved with the aggressive repression of the so-called kulaks (Russian term) and kurkuli (Ukrainian term) – who were private farmers who were not members of collective farms that were labelled by the communists as being wealthy.
|
|
All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories: # Those to be > shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police # Those > to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals or Kazakhstan, after > confiscation of their property # Those to be evicted from their houses and > used in labor colonies within their own districts Kolkhozes were typically divided up into "brigades" of 15-30 households. Over time, these came to be more permanent, and, in the 1950s, they were re- organized into "complex brigades". Brigades were often themselves divided into "links" of a few people. As opposed to Sovkhozes, or state-run farms, who employed salaried workers, the Kolkhoz workers were supposed to be paid by the day worked, although the actual rate of pay varied greatly in practice—cash was occasionally used, but more often payment was given in grain, and this only meagerly.
|
|
In February 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the OGPU secret police, and Matvei Berman, head of the GULAG labor camp system, proposed a self-described "grandiose plan" to Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, to resettle up to two million people to Siberia and Kazakhstan in "special settlements." The deportees, or "settlers," were to bring over a million hectares (10,000 km2; 2.5 million acres; 4,000 sqmi) of virgin land in the sparsely populated regions into production and become self-sufficient within two years. Ch. 13 Yagoda and Berman's plan was based on the experience of deporting two million kulaks (wealthier land-owning peasants) and other agricultural workers to the same areas that had occurred in the previous three years as part of the Dekulakization policy. However, unlike the previous plan, resources available to support the new plan were severely limited by the ongoing famine in the Soviet Union.
|
|
After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo.Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (1980) In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks (wealthier peasants), and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism (in Marxist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that socialist gains could be consolidated in a single country, without that country relying on simultaneous successful revolutions across the world.
|
|
In 1931, during the collectivisation of agriculture, when hundreds of thousands of peasants who classed as Kulaks, or who resisted being forced to join collective farms, were rounded up and deported to Siberia, Dolgikh was appointed head of the Western Siberia Department of Special Settlements, in charge of 300,000 deportees.. The area he controlled was divided into thirty administrative districts, the most northerly of which was Alexandro- Vakhovskaya, an area of about 50,000 square kms (19,000 square miles) straddling the Ob River, accessible only by riverboat from May to October. Before collectivisation, the area had a population of around 4,000, of whom a third where Ostyaks. In February 1933, the local Ogpu commander received an order telling him to receive 25,000 deportees. Unable to cope with the numbers, the Ogpu deposited about 6,000 deportees on Nazino, an island on the Ob river, with inadequate food.
|
|
That year, the Komsomol recommended the formation of a single youth group, and at a congress on March 19-21, 1949, hitherto separate youth organisations were merged to create a Union of Working Youth (Uniunea Tineretului Muncitoresc; UTM). Its name was changed back to UTC in 1965. Right after the single organisation was formed, the party asked for a purge, which in its first phase involved the "re-signing up" of UTM members (equivalent to PMR "verification" campaigns). After this process, 34,000 UTM members and activists were purged as "dangerous elements" (kulaks (chiaburi), former Iron Guard or National Christian Party members, former members of democratic parties, religious activists (especially non-Orthodox ones), UTM leaders who did not heed PRM decisions, etc.). The UTM now numbered 650,000 members; purges would continue, under the pretext of "improving its class composition", especially after the turbulent years of 1952, 1956, and 1968.
|
|
199 Löwenthal contended that comparisons between Hitler and Stalin were appropriate, but comparisons between Hitler and Lenin were not. For Löwenthal, the decisive factor that governed Lenin's conduct was that right from the onset when he took power, he was involved in civil wars within Russia Löwenthal argued that “Lenin’s battle to hold on to power” did not comprise “one-sided mass annihilation of defenceless people” Speaking of the Russian Civil War, Löwenthal argued that “In all these battles there were heavy losses on both sides and horrible torture and murders of prisoners” Löwenthal in Piper (1993) pp. 199–200 Speaking of the differences between Lenin and Stalin, Löwenthal argued that “What Stalin did from 1929 on was something entirely different”Löwenthal in Piper (1993) p. 200 Löwenthal argued that with dekulakization, the so-called “kulaks” were to destroyed by the Soviet state as: > a hindrance to forced collectivization.
|
|
In Tambov Province, in the central agricultural zone, a survey conducted by zemstvo authorities in the 1880s found that two out of three peasant households could not feed themselves without also simultaneously going into debt; this was made worse by the fact that peasant farmers had to sell off grain in autumn, when prices were low due to high supply, and buy grain in the spring at double the prices – often to the same kulaks, usurers who could have whole villages indebted, often leaving peasants in need to sell parts of their lands off to pay off their debts.Figes, p. 104 The differences in wealth and living standards of the peasantry between the central agricultural region and the surrounding agricultural areas were rooted in two factors, that is 'local differences in the quality of the soil', and 'historic legacies stretching back to the days of serfdom'. Villages composed of former serfs were also less rich in land than those consisting of 'state peasants', i.e.
|
|
Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.72-73 and, in order to combat the Romanian leu's devaluation, a surprise monetary reform was imposed as a stabilization measure in August 1947 (severely limiting the amount convertible by people without an actual job, primarily members of the aristocracy).Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.73-74 The Marshall Plan was being overtly condemned,Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.74 while nationalization and a planned economy were enforced beginning 11 June 1948.Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.74-75 The first five-year plan, conceived by Miron Constantinescu's Soviet- Romanian committee, was adopted in 1950.Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.75-76 Of newly enforced measures, the arguably most far-reaching was collectivization—by 1962, when the process was considered complete, 96% of the total arable land had been enclosed in collective farming, while around 80,000 peasants faced trial for resisting and 17,000 others were uprooted or deported for being chiaburi (the Romanian equivalent of kulaks).Cioroianu, Pe umerii..., p.
|
|
Forest Brothers), their supporters and families from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The decision specified deportee quotas for each republic: 8,500 families or 25,500 people from Lithuania, 13,000 families or 39,000 people from Latvia, and 7,500 families or 22,500 people from Estonia. Lists of kulaks to be deported were to be compiled by each republic and approved by each republic's Council of Ministers. It also listed responsibilities of each Soviet ministry: the Ministry of State Security (MGB) was responsible for gathering the deportees and transporting them to the designated railway stations; the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was responsible for the transportation to the forced settlements, provision of employment at the destination, and continued surveillance and administration; Ministry of Finance was to allocate sufficient funds (5.60 rubles per person per day of travel); Ministry of Communications was to provide the railway stock cars; Ministries of Trade and Health were to provide food and health care en route to the destination.
|
|
"Working individual peasants and collective farmers" who stole kolkhoz property and grain should be sentenced to ten years; the death penalty should be imposed only for "systematic theft of grain, sugar beets, animals, etc." Soviet expectations for the 1932 grain crop were high because of Ukraine's bumper crop the previous year, which Soviet authorities believed were sustainable. When it became clear that the 1932 grain deliveries were not going to meet the expectations of the government, the decreased agricultural output was blamed on the kulaks, and later to agents and spies of foreign Intelligence Services--"nationalists", "Petlurovites", and from 1937 on, Trotskyists. According to a report by the head of the Supreme Court, by January 15, 1933, as many as 103,000 people (more than 14,000 in the Ukrainian SSR) had been sentenced under the provisions of the August 7 decree. Of the 79,000 whose sentences were known to the Supreme Court, 4,880 had been sentenced to death, 26,086 to ten years' imprisonment, and 48,094 to other sentences.
|
|
The initial collectivization drive was accompanied by an intensification of the class struggle in the villages, through the elimination of wealthy peasants (chiaburi, also referred to by the Russian term kulaks); members of this class were intimidated, beaten, arrested and imprisoned, on the grounds that they had employed the labour of poor peasants to work their land. On the grassroots level, the USSR used cadres, members of the proletarian and peasant class who were to promote communism among the public. The party-state used various tactics to convince peasants of the benefits of collectivization, including propaganda such as films and operas, denunciations of suspected class enemies and saboteurs, and encouraging peasants to write petitions in order to inculcate them in socialist norms. "Persuasion work" (muncă de lămurire) was initially a major force for collectivizing the countryside, although these efforts were hapless due to the small size of the agitation workers cadre and their lack of knowledge on agricultural issues. Kligman & Verdery, p. 286-89.
|
|
Wanda Wasilewska The prisons soon became severely overcrowded with detainees suspected of anti-Soviet activities and the NKVD had to open dozens of ad hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests led to forced resettlement of large categories of people (kulaks, Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labor camps. An estimated 30–40 thousand Polish citizens were held at the labor camps in 1939–1941. The Polish and formerly Polish citizens, a large proportion of whom were ethnic minorities, were deported mostly in 1940, typically to northern Russia, Kazakhstan and Siberia. According to the NKVD data, of the 107,000 Polish citizens of different ethnicities arrested by June 1941, 39,000 were tried and sentenced for various transgressions, including 1200 given death sentences. At that time, 40,000 were imprisoned in NKVD prisons and about 10,000 of them were murdered by the Soviets during prison evacuation after the German attack.
|
|
A screen shot of the 1936 document About the anti-Soviet elements () also known as Decision of the Politbureau of the CC of the VKP(b) No. P51/94 () was a provision of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of 2 July 1937 that initiated the Great Purge. The resolution of the document was composed and signed by Stalin for secretaries of regional committees and Central Committees of National Communist parties about necessity to take in accountability all "kulaks" (a term for affluent peasants) in order to have them arrested immediately and liquidated. Within five day the Central Committee should be provided a report on composition of troikas (NKVD special committees) and number of people who should be arrested (and executed through shooting) as well as those who were sentenced to imprisonment in forced-labor camps (in document is used a term "expulsion"). This provision triggered the Order No. 00447 of the People's Commissariat of Interior (NKVD) which was headed at that time by Nikolay Yezhov.
|
|
The platform called for the state to adopt a programme for mass industrialisation and to encourage the mechanization and collectivisation of agriculture, thereby developing the means of production and helping the Soviet Union move towards parity with Western capitalist countries, which would also increase the proportion of the economy which was part of the socialised sector of the economy and definitively shift the Soviet Union towards a socialist mode of production. There was also the Right Opposition, which was led by the leading party theoretician and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and supported by Sovnarkom Chairman (prime minister) Alexei Rykov. In late 1924, as Stalin proposed his new socialism in one country theory, Stalin drew closer to the Right Opposition and his triumvirate with Zinoviev and Kamenev slowly broke up over the next year (Zinoviev and Kamenev were both executed in 1936). The Right Opposition were allied to Stalin's Centre from late 1924 until their alliance broke up in the years from 1928–1930 over strategy towards the kulaks and NEPmen.
|
|
These views ignited a firestorm of controversy. Most historians in West Germany and virtually all historians outside Germany condemned Nolte's interpretation as factually incorrect, and as coming dangerously close to justifying the Holocaust.Kershaw, p. 173 Many historians, such as Steven T. Katz, claimed that Nolte's “Age of Genocide” concept “trivialized” the Holocaust by reducing it to one of just many 20th century genocides.Katz, Steven The Holocaust in Historical Context Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 pp. 23–24 A common line of criticism was that Nazi crimes, above all the Holocaust, were singular and unique in their nature, and should not be loosely analogized to the crimes of others. Some historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler were most forceful in arguing that the sufferings of the “kulaks” deported during the Soviet “dekulakization” campaign of the early 1930s were in no way analogous to the suffering of the Jews deported in the early 1940s. Many were angered by Nolte's claim that "the so-called annihilation of the Jews under the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original", with many wondering why Nolte spoke of the "so-called annihilation of the Jews" in describing the Holocaust.
|
|