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Why did Joseph Stalin want to elimate the kulaks from society?

Question by Victoriiaa: Why did Stalin want to elimate the kulaks from society?
how did collective farms and state farms lead to the elimination of the kulaks according to stalin?

Answers and Views:

Answer by aural margin
Warning: questions about Russian history generally have long answers. The short one is

1) they were likely to resist his policies

2) kulaks gone, private land gone

Kulak–Meaning “Fist” in Russian. Name for the landlords of rural Russia.

How the Kulaks came to be: Land tenure in feudal Russia had been arranged where land was split into long narrow strips; the serfs tended two strips side by side; one for the landlord, the other for themselves.

After serfdom was abolished in 1861, the land the serfs had once cultivated for themselves was now owned by the peasant commune, formed from those peasants who were once serfs to a common landlord. The landlords retained the lands that were not used for maintaining the serfs (eg. the majority of their former lands) – still in strips next to the communal land. The landlords also kept all their forested and pastoral lands. Thus, serfs had once been able to graze their animals (commonly a cow and horse) on pastoral land, now they could not. The newly “emancipated” peasants were also stranded from the most prized commodity of Russia throughout most of the year – firewood.

From these conditions was born the Kulak, who imposed on the peasantry a tax to use their pastoral lands. The peasant communes responded by lying fallow some of their own land and turning it into pasture. Their remained, however, strips of the landlord’s land running throughout their community, with which the kulak established a system of tolls for each animal that crossed over his land. On the matter of wood, peasants had little choice but to work the kulak’s land in return for a payment that would allow them to cut timber from the kulak’s forest.

This relationship throughout Russia gave birth to the first revolutionary parties in Russia.

Throughout the early twentieth century kulaks bought communal land where they could, but it was difficult to do so; the communes refused to sell their land despite threats and pressure. During World War I, kulaks came into a new era.

Kulaks bribed local officials to prevent conscription into the army, and lay in wait for the field of opportunity to soon open up. While hundreds of thousands of peasants were sent to the slaughter on the front, kulaks grabbed up the communal land in a free-for-all.

By 1917, the success of kulaks cannot be seen more clearly than in the amount of land they owned: over nine-tenths of Russia’s arable land.

Stalin believed any future insurrection would be led by the Kulaks, thus he proclaimed a policy aimed at “liquidating the Kulaks as a class.”

Declared “enemies of the people,” the Kulaks were left homeless and without a single possession as everything was taken from them, even their pots and pans. It was also forbidden by law for anyone to aid dispossessed Kulak families. Some researchers estimate that ten million persons were thrown out of their homes, put on railroad box cars and deported to “special settlements” in the wilderness of Siberia during this era, with up to a third of them perishing amid the frigid living conditions. Men and older boys, along with childless women and unmarried girls, also became slave-workers in Soviet-run mines and big industrial projects.

Once-proud village farmers were by now reduced to the level of rural factory workers on large collective farms. Anyone refusing to participate in the compulsory collectivization system was simply denounced as a Kulak and deported.

Stalin’s adoption in 1929 of forced collectivization of agriculture marked a grim struggle between the regime and the peasantry. Sparked by the grain procurement crisis in 1927, in 1928 grain marketings remained low bc of low govt price policies. Kulaks withheld grain waiting for a rise in prices; this was not the first time they had done this.

During WWI the most valuable commodity throughout the war was grain, and the kulaks understood this with absolute clarity: food prices climbed higher than any other commodity during the war. In 1916, food prices accelerated three times higher than wages, despite bumper harvests in both 1915 and 1916. Hoping to raise prices, the kulaks hoarded their food surplus as their lands continually increased.

Publicly Stalin announced that poor and middle peasants were voluntarily forming into collective farms. Secretly, Stalin and his buddies ordered local officials to try massive collectivization in selected areas. When results seems positive, Stalin ordered general collectivization led by some 25,000 urban party activists. Entire villages had to deliver their grain to the state at low prices. Kulaks were deliberately overassessed.

Initial measures of collectivization were sudden and brutal, confused and ill prepared. Many officials tried to force all peasants into KOLKHOZY. Stalin and Molotov pressed for speed, overruled all objections and rejected requests for private plots and peasant ownership of tools and livestock.

By a decree of Feb. 1930 “actively hostile” Kulaks were to be sent to forced labor camps, “economically potent” ones relocated and their property confiscated and the “least noxious” ones were admitted into collective farms.

Results: Disaster! Up to 5 million people were deported, hundreds of thousands of families were broken up, and millions of peasants embittered.

Between 1928 and 1933 forced collectivization cost the Soviet state 27% of its livestock and caused over 2 million deaths during collectivization plus 5 million deaths in the famine of 1933-34

Ultimately, collective farms drained and not sustained the economy.

It is important to note that the Five-Year Plan, whatever its failures, accomplished a major aim of Stalin and the Communist Party. At breakneck speed it literally built an industrial base for what grew after WWII into the second largest economy in the world–it even eventually outproduced the Nazi war machine

–advanced technical modernization of the country and established a scientific and engineering foundation.

In the overall assessment of the push to industrialize it is also vital to consider the costs: collectivization brought both human and economic catastrophe–the effort took several million lives and spawned untold suffering.

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