Kulak

The kulaks or kulakí (from the Russian кулак: /kulak/, fist) were the farmers of Tsarist Russia who owned land and hired workers. Later the term was used to designate all agricultural owners convicted for opposing collectivization.

Etymology

It was a derogatory term used in Soviet political language, which initially referred to the former landowners of the Russian Empire who had large areas of land, although during the first years of the Soviet government it was used to classify as enemies of the people simple rural owners. These represented 18% of the population in Tsarist times.

History

After the abolition of serfdom by Alexander II at the end of the XIX century, twenty-two and a half million serfs were freed, creating the peasantry as a social class.

In 1906 Piotr Stolypin created a new reform with the intention of creating a group of prosperous peasants who would support the Tsar's government. In 1912, 16% of Russian farmers had at least 32,000 m² for each male in the family (a threshold used to demarcate the middle class from wealthy peasants). The peasantry was divided into three classes: bedniaks (бедняки): the poorest; seredniaks (середняки): the middle class; and kulaks (кулаки): the rich farmers. In addition, there were the batraks (батраки), who were landless farmers. The so-called kulaks used to have the best land and the best farming instruments.

After the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks expropriated the land from the nobility and large landowners, nationalizing it (see the Land Code of 1922) and subsequently distributing the land among farmers or keeping it in the hands of the State.. Over time some farmers managed to prosper. These small landowners, called kulaks, lived moderately well-off, making up 5% to 7% of the Soviet population.

The new land-owning peasants who prospered through capitalist means were considered by the Bolsheviks as an agrarian bourgeoisie, with total collectivization beginning in 1929. The agricultural class in general was opposed to collectivization, causing anti-Soviet movements that, together with the growing nationalist sentiment in Ukraine, they became a danger to the Soviet state. Previously, during the NEP, the sale of agricultural products on the market, the hiring of wage labor and the leasing of land were allowed, which were tolerated and even defended by the State.

With the subsequent application of the policy of forced agrarian collectivization, a confrontation began between the State forces and the insurgent peasants who were generically called kuláks. Especially this was directed against the prosperous Ukrainian peasantry. Being accused by the Soviet authorities of illegal retention and speculation with food, the peasantry was subject, during the mandate of Joseph Stalin, to severe measures of state terrorism and requisitions that led to revolts that were decimated militarily and whose participants would end up deported to camps. concentration camps installed within Ukraine's own borders. ^{[citation required]} This alleged genocide was known as Holodomor or Ukrainian genocide. The massive flight to the cities in search of food aggravated the situation, since the cities were short of supplies, which led to a widespread situation of animal feeding and even cannibalism. At the height of the famine, around 25,000 people died every day in Ukraine. The final count is between five and eight million people. The "dekulakization" and agrarian collectivization, plus the effects of the civil war, left the Ukrainian countryside, previously Russia's breadbasket, in very serious conditions.