Dekulakisation as mass violence

1) Context

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The 'dekulakisation' campaign begun in January 1930 had in reality a twofold objective: to “extract” “elements” likely to resist collectivisation; and to “colonise” the vast, inhospitable areas of Siberia, the Northern Region, the Urals and Kazakhstan.

The first objective corresponded to the view, clearly expressed by the Bolsheviks when they took power, that peasant society contained “exploitative elements” that were irremediably hostile to the regime and that would sooner or later have to be “liquidated as a class”. In fact, Stalin merely repeated Lenin’s famous diatribes against the ‘kulaks’: since 1918, ‘kulaks’, an artificially constructed group, had been subjected to stereotyping and deshumanisation; they had been designated, in the press and propaganda, as “cockroaches”, “blood-suckers”, “vampires”, or just plain “scum”, “vermin” and “garbage” to be cleansed, crushed and liquidated.

The official policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, adopted by the Stalinists at the end of 1929, did not, however, imply physical liquidation of all ‘kulaks’. The great majority of them were to be expropriated and deported, thus fulfilling the second objective of “dekulakisation”: to provide cheap labour for the colonisation and economic development of the country’s inhospitable areas, which were rich in natural resources.

In three years (1930-1932), more than 5 million ‘kulaks’ were either expropriated or reduced to poverty after having had to sell, hurriedly, their property (the authorities called this process “self-dekulakisation”); 2.3 million men, women and children were deported (of whom half a million died); over 300,000 were arrested and interned; between 20,000 and 30,000 were sentenced to death by extra-judicial courts.

2) Decision-making processes and implementation of the dekulakisation campaigns (1930-1932)

On 27 December 1929, Stalin publicly demanded “the eradication of the kulaks as a class”. A commission from the Politburo issued a secret resolution defining three categories of ‘kulaks’:

- those “engaged in counterrevolutionary activities” (“first category”) were to be arrested and transferred to work camps or executed if they put up any resistance. Their families were to be deported and all their property confiscated. The resolution set a limit of 63,000 household heads in the “first category” (in fact, 284,000 persons were to be arrested during the first six months, 20,000 of whom were sentenced to death by troïki);

The lists of first-category kulak households were drawn up exclusively by the GPU. Most of the victims appear to have been on index-cards catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the GPU.

- those “who manifested less active opposition to the Soviet state but were arch-exploiters and naturally supported counter-revolution”, placed in the “second category”, were to be arrested and deported with their families to remote areas of the Northern region, Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan. All their property – except the most essential domestic goods, a minimum amount of food and up to 500 rubles per family – was to be confiscated. The commission set a quota of 154,000 households (in fact, 400,000 families were to be deported in 1930-1931);

- the remainder of the kulaks, described as “loyal to the regime” and classified in the “third category”, were to be expropriated and resettled on “land requiring improvement, outside the limits of the collective farm lands but within the administrative district in which they lived”.

It is important to note that the ‘kulaks’ were defined in terms of families, not as individuals. Thus, not only were the head of the family and his wife considered ‘kulaks’, but also their children and, more broadly, all their relatives, young and old (elderly persons, children and infants constituted in fact the majority of the deported, and the majority of those who died).

Operations were coordinated in each district by a troika (three-man commission) composed of the First Secretary of the local Party committee, the president of the local Soviet Executive Committee, and the head of the local GPU, and carried out, from the first days of February 1930, by special dekulakisation commissions and brigades comprised of Communist Party activists from large factories mobilised and sent to the countryside especially for the occasion, local Communist functionaries, GPU (secret police) functionaries and various village “aktivi” (‘assets’) led by a Komsomol.

The dekulakisation brigades had to meet the required quotas and, if possible, surpass them. This opened the door to all sorts of abuses, settling of old scores, plundering and ravaging by the villages’ criminal elements and a nucleus of young and more or less enthusiastic believers. According to a GPU report from Smolensk:

the brigades took from the wealthy peasants their winter clothes, their warm underclothes, and above all their shoes. They left the kulaks standing in their underwear and bare feet. They took everything, even old rubber shoes, women’s clothes, tea worth no more than 50 kopeks, water pitchers and pokers (…) They confiscated everything, even the pillows from under the heads of babies, and stew from the family pot, which they smeared on the icons they had smashed.”

Dekulakised properties were usually simply looted or given away at auction: wooden houses were sold for 1 ruble, cows for 20 or 30 kopeks each, a hundredth of their real value.

The violence perpetrated by the dekulakisation gangs was horrific. One GPU report noted:

These people drove the dekulakised naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking-bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.”

To carry out the arrests and deportations, military logistics, unprededented in peacetime and mobilising hundreds of rail convoys and tens of thousands of special troops provided by the GPU, were set up. However, the vast scale of the project led to huge problems in coordinating the militarised deportation operations carried out by the GPU and the settlement of the deportees, which was left to the initiative of local authorities, which were overwhelmed by the task or simply indifferent to the fate of the dekulakised people

As the rather acerbic correspondence between the GPU and the People’s Commissariat of Transport demonstrates, the formation and progression of the transport convoys was invariably a painfully slow process. In the great depots, such as Vologda, Kotlas, Rostov, Sverdlovsk or Omsk, convoys would remain for weeks, filled with their human cargo. When railway convoys finally arrived at their destination, the interminable journey often continued for several hundred more kilometres on sledges (in winter), carts (in spring), or even on foot. Often, as the authorities in the district of Tomsk (Western Siberia) reported on 7 March 1930, “it has been impossible to transport the two months’ supplies that the kulaks are entitled to bring with them” – it was therefore without provisions or tools, and often without any shelter, that the deportees had to begin their new lives. One report from the province of Arkhangelsk in September 1930 admitted that of the planned 1,641 living quarters for the deportees, only seven had been built. Hundreds of thousands were left to their fate on the steppes or in the middle of marshy pine forests without regular food supplies or work. The fortunate ones who had been able to bring some tools with them could build some sort of rudimentary shelter, often the traditional zemlianka, a simple hole in the ground covered with branches.

Epidemics and acute shortages (and even, in some cases, famine) decimated the deportes, first of all the children and the elderly. Amidst this deadly chaos, the strongest and most resolute escaped (for example, 15% of the 230,000 “dekulakised” deported to the Northern region had escaped by December 1930). By the end of 1930, fewer than 10% of adult deportees had been put to work (Viola, 2007). Of the 200,000 “dekulakised” people deported to the Urals, a mere 8% were detailed to “productive activities” in April 1931.

For the second wave of “dekulakisation”, aimed at “totally cleansing the kulaks from all agricultural regions”, the Politburo established, on 11 March 1931, a special commission chaired by V. Andreev, to “halt the dreadful mess of the deportation of manpower”. A whole network of komandatury, run by the GPU, was set up to supervise and organise all aspects of the everyday life and working conditions of the deportees.

Deportees, known in the police jargon as spetzposelentsy (“special displaced persons”) were stripped of their civil rights, forced to reside in designated areas (called spetzposelki, or “special settlements”) and subjected to forced labour in agricultural, industrial or mining works controlled by the GPU. The GPU also rented the deportees under its control, in exchange for a commission, to a number of state-run industrial enterprises, such as Urallesprom (forestry), Uralugol, Vostugol (coal mining) and Tsvetmetzoloto (non-ferrous minerals, gold). These companies were to provide living quarters for their workers, schooling for children, and a regular supply of food for all. In reality, their managers usually treated this slave workforce as a source of free labour. The deportees were expected to produce 30-50% more than the free workers, and their pay (when they were paid at all) was pitiful.

This second wave of deportation began in early May 1931, and lasted for nearly five months. According to a GPU report dated 30 September 1931, 265,795 “kulak families” (1,243,860 persons) were deported, more than twice as many as in 1930, which was, until recently, seen as the apex of the “dekulakisation” campaign. The second-wave deportations appear to have been carried out more efficiently than those of the first wave in 1930: there were fewer cases of deportees being simply abandonned in the taïga or the steppe; most of them were allocated to construction sites, mines or forestry.

Deportations continued in 1932-1933, but at a slower pace. The number of people deported to distant regions during the 1930-1933 dekulakisation campaigns accordingly works out at about 2.3 million. On top of this, we must add those who were shipped directly to the gulags (the so-called first-category kulaks): approximately 300,000 to 350,000 people.

3) Victims

A few months before the launching of the dekulakisation campaign, the Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the Soviet government) suggested the following features by which a kulak farm might be identified– a farm that regularly hires waged labour; that possesses an “industrial undertaking”, such as a mill; that hires out power-driven agricultural machinery, or premises; or whose members are involved in commercial activities or who have income not deriving from work (a single one of these features was sufficient for people to be categorised as ‘kulaks’).

Several of the definitions were disquietingly vague, above all “other income not deriving from work”, and it was easy for zealous and vigilant executants to find ‘kulaks’ wherever they chose to look, including:

• incomplete tax returns,
• denunciations by neighbours
• having sold grain on the market
• having had an employee to help with the harvest back in 1925 or 1926
• for having killed a pig in September 1929 “with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus keeping it away from socialist appropriation”.
• some of their relatives had fought in the White Army
• because of their “numerous visits to the church”
• they resisted collectivisation.

In fact, dekulakisation often turned into social cleansing of all “socially alien elements”, among whom featured “police officers of the Tsarist regime”, “White officers”, former landlords and shopkeepers, members of the “rural intelligentsia” (among them many teachers), many of whom had joined the SR (socialist-revolutionary) party in 1917-18. One GPU report shows that the so-called kulaks represented only 55% of the total; the “middle peasants” (seredniaks) accounted for 15%; shopkeepers 15%; priests, monks and nuns 6%; teachers and other members of the rural intelligentsia 4%.

How many ‘kulaks’ died in the course of “de-kulakization”? On 1 January 1932, the GPU carried out a general census of all deportees: it listed 1,317,022 people. Considering a number of local GPU reports on escapes by deported ‘kulaks’ still leaves us with more than half a million deportees’ deaths in 1930-33, or 22% of the 2.3 million people deported during those years, most of them from general exhaustion and hunger.