Dekulakization
"Smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class."
-Joseph Stalin
Eradication of KulaksJoseph Stalin instigated a dekulakization campaign, where kulaks, comparatively wealthy peasants, were arrested, shot, exiled, or packed into work camps.
"A farmer who was labeled a kulak lost everything. Those who resisted faced execution or a long sentence in one of the forced-labor camps. Even many who did not resist were deported in cattle trucks and trains to Central Asia or the Siberian wilderness. Hunger and exposure killed tens of thousands along the way." Click on the image below to enlarge.
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Click on the image below to enlarge.
"We will annihilate kulaks as a class." -Caption of poster "In 1930, brigades of party workers and soldiers spread through the countryside. They dragged peasants off their farms at gunpoint. Harvests, livestock, and equipment were carted away to the new collectives." |
Click on any of the three images below to enlarge.
(Interview excerpts from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System)
"Hundreds of thousands of peasants were murdered throughout Russia – but especially in Ukraine – on the orders of Stalin. They were the first true victims of Stalin's purges."
-Kelley Hassan, history major at Lourdes College
Effects on Livestock Populations
In protest of these actions, peasants smashed their farming equipment and slaughtered their livestock rather than surrendering them to the collective purpose.
"...I have driven around several collective farms [kolkhozes] and consider it necessary to inform you about a few items. I was in various kolkhozes—not productive and relatively unproductive ones, but everywhere there was only one sight—that of a huge shortage of seed, famine, and extreme emaciation of livestock. |
"Animals were slaughtered every night. Hardly had dusk fallen than the muffled bleats of sheep, the death squeals of pigs or the lowing of calves could be heard. Both those who had joined the collective farm and individual farmers slaughtered their stock. 'Slaughter, they'll take it for meat anyway...Slaughter, you won't get meat on the collective farm...,' crept the insidious rumors. And they slaughtered. They ate till they could eat no more. Young and old suffered from indigestion. At dinner-time tables groaned under boiled and roasted meat. At dinner-time everyone had a greasy mouth, everyone hiccoughed as if at a wake. Everyone blinked like an owl, as if drunk from eating." Click on the image below to enlarge.
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"Violent, forced collectivization unleashed by the Stalinist clique against the peasantry as a whole...turned into a virtual nationwide civil war."
-University of Melbourne Professor Vadim Rogovin in lecture- Stalin's Great Terror: Origins and Consequences