The response to this tirade was silence—and then a “babel of shouts.” Finally, one of the women spat at the whole gathering: “Only pigs have come here; I might as well go home.” A local agitator shouted back: “What do we see? What do we hear? One of our citizens, a poor woman, but one with a decided kulak quirk in her mind, has just called us pigs!” In other words, it was not her wealth that defined the woman as “kulak”—or rather as a person with a “kulak quirk in her mind”—but her opposition to collectivization.41
