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But who was a kulak? As noted, this term was not traditional everywhere in the USSR, and certainly not in Ukraine. Although widely used in newspapers, by agitators and by authorities of all kinds since the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, it had always been vague and ill-defined.
The definition, infinitely adaptable, seemed to expand most easily to encompass the smaller ethnic groups who lived in the USSR,
Orders to liquidate the kulaks came accompanied by numbers and lists: how many should be removed, how many exiled, how many sent to the newly expanding concentration camps of the Gulag, how many resettled in other villages.
Policemen on the ground were responsible for meeting these quotas, whether they were able to identify kulaks or not. And if they couldn’t find them, then they would have to be created.
Of all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks:
The high numbers for Ukraine may have reflected the higher percentage of peasants there. They may also have reflected Moscow’s perception that the Ukraine’s peasants remained the greatest source of political threat.
to the agitators, anyone who didn’t join the collective farm must by definition be part of the counter-revolution, part of the defeated Ukrainian national movement, part of one of the many “enemies” of the Soviet regime.
once a peasant was named a “kulak,” he was automatically a traitor, an enemy and a non-citizen. He lost his property rights, his legal standing, his home and his place of work.
Some 10 million peasants entered the Soviet industrial workforce in the years 1928–32; many, perhaps most, were forced or persuaded to do so by collectivization and de-kulakization.
But the overwhelming number of kulaks wound up much farther away from home. Between 1930 and 1933 over 2 million peasants were exiled to Siberia, northern Russia, Central Asia and other underpopulated regions of the Soviet Union, where they lived as “special exiles,”
This was the first of what would be several mass Soviet deportations in the 1930s and 1940s, and the most chaotic.
In time, the large numbers of deported kulaks would fuel the rapid expansion of the Soviet forced labour system, the chain of camps that eventually became known as the Gulag.
Religious repression in the USSR began in 1917 and lasted until 1991, but in Ukraine it reached its brutal height during collectivization.
collectivization left the peasants economically dependent on the state.
the methods used to collectivize the peasants destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order. Old values—respect for property, for dignity, for human life—disappeared.
All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken.
The result was rapid, massive, sometimes chaotic and often violent resistance.
“Dizzy with Success.” That was the title of an article written by Stalin and published in Pravda on 2 March 1930.
Such successes sometimes induce a spirit of vanity and conceit…People not infrequently become intoxicated by such successes, they become dizzy with success, lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities…adventurist
Why did he write this article?
The letter neatly shifted the responsibility for what was clearly a disastrous policy away from him, and onto a social group far from Moscow.
The temperate language of Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success” article turned out to be just that: language. The same policies continued, and even grew harsher.
Threatened by violence and afraid of hunger, hundreds of thousands of peasants finally relinquished their land, animals and machines to the collective farms.
The fruits of their labour no longer belonged to them; the grain they sowed and harvested was now requisitioned by the authorities.
Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives.
As a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible.
Collective farms produced dramatically less than they could or should have done.
Convinced that collectivization was now on the path to success, the Kremlin made what would turn out to be a disastrous and callous decision: to increase the export of grain, as well as of other food products, out of the Soviet Union in exchange for hard currency.
In July 1930 the state also opened the “Torgsin” chain of hard currency shops (from torgovlia s inostrantsami, or “trade with foreigners”), originally created to attract foreign visitors forbidden to spend foreign money elsewhere but later accessible to Soviet citizens.
during the famine they would become a means of survival for peasants who had saved gold objects or even had foreign currency transferred to them from relatives abroad.
By the summer of 1931 bureaucrats and activists at all levels were once again warning of trouble to come.
Aside from the weather problems, their report described unprepared storage containers, as well as tractors and other machinery in poor condition:
Multiple reports—some sent directly to Stalin—described the poor working practices of the collective farms and their inefficient methods.
By late autumn it was clear that grain collection all across the USSR would fall short of the targets; the official harvest total for 1931–2 would eventually come to 69.5 million tonnes, instead of the 83 million-plus expected.
collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages.
it was not possible to question the policy because it was already too closely associated with Stalin himself.
Since Stalin could not be responsible, and since senior party officials did not want to be, responsibility for the looming disaster was again sought further down the hierarchy.
In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the USSR. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity.
Local party leaders, their careers on the line, organized groups of activists and sent them, village by village, to begin confiscating whatever grain they could find.
In the spring of 1932 secret police informers also began, for the first time in a decade, to use the word “famine” in describing the situation in Ukrainian villages.47 The republican government in Kharkiv also began to act as if it understood that the threat of hunger was very real.
In the spring of 1932 a few high-ranking Ukrainian communists finally gathered the courage to call for a drastic change of direction.
Everyone knew that the provision of food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure—yet if the Ukrainian peasants were not spared their grain and encouraged to sow their crops, everyone also knew that catastrophe would follow.
Stalin had received some alarming material on the political situation in Ukraine. The archives don’t record exactly what it was he read, though it is possible to guess.
Prompted by whatever had provoked his note, Stalin immediately withdrew the millet and other food aid to Ukraine.
in the summer of 1932, the policies that could have prevented mass famine in Ukraine were quietly abandoned.
Even as hunger spread, the state continued to issue plans and orders designed to maintain the export of grain abroad.
many peasants were beginning to harvest grain prematurely, and secretly, and then keeping it for themselves.
Theft was not Stalin’s only concern in the summer of 1932. Soon after passage of the 7 August law, he received a startling document from the Ukrainian secret police.
in August 1932 the Ukrainian secret police sent him a straightforward set of quotations without commentary. The quotations were all collected from informers and attributed to Ukrainian party members operating at district level, all of whom were bitterly opposed to the grain requisition campaign.
the report confirmed all of Stalin’s worst fears. He had long perceived a clear connection between the grain collection problem in Ukraine and the threat of nationalism in the republic. Now he heard a clear echo of the events of the previous decade: the civil war, the peasant revolt, the Bolshevik setback.
