Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Although Marx believed that peasants had no important role in the coming revolution, Lenin, who was more pragmatic, modified these views to a degree. He thought that the peasants were indeed potentially revolutionary—he approved of their desire for radical land reform—but believed that they needed to be guided by the more progressive working class. “Not all peasants fighting for land and freedom are fully aware of what their struggle implies,” he wrote in 1905. Class-conscious workers would need to teach them that real revolution required not just land reform but the “fight against the rule of capital.” Ominously, Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders. This explained why “not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism.”34 This idea—that the smallest landowners, later called kulaks, were a fundamentally counter-revolutionary, capitalist force—would have great consequences some years later.