Status Updates From Stalin's Peasants: Resistan...

When a kolkhoznik named Kazakov left the "Red Banner" kolkhoz in the Western oblast to work in a factory, his son and daughter were expelled from the kolkhoz, as a result of which the son 'threw himself in despair under a train.'

Petro Shcherbakov...was dekulakized but managed to bribe the rural soviet chairman with a sewing machine to get a document identifying him as a "middle peasant"; the two of them sat up all night drinking and then Shcherbakov left the village forever.

More often, villagers wept as the kulaks were taken away...At a village gathering in Manuilovo, young kulaks played such plaintive songs on the accordion that they "forced all the young people to weep."

A linguist investigating peasant comprehension of the new Soviet vocabulary reported that the new word "Communist" was often defined as "the ones who don't believe in God."