Dekulakization

Dekulakization (Russian: раскулачивание, romanized: raskulachivaniye; Ukrainian: розкуркулення, romanized: rozkurkulennya) was a campaign of repression in the Soviet Union directed against so-called kulaks, a loosely defined category of supposedly wealthy or exploitative peasants. The campaign involved mass arrests, executions, expropriation of property, and deportations of entire households to remote and inhospitable regions. The campaign began following Joseph Stalin's announcement of the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on December 27, 1929. It had two objectives: to eliminate potential resistance to the collectivization of agriculture, and to provide forced labor for the colonization and economic exploitation of Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet North. Between 2.1 and 2.3 million people were deported to special settlements in remote regions between 1930 and 1933. Between 20,000 and 30,000 were executed by extrajudicial commissions (troiki). Historian Manfred Hildermeier estimates the death toll of dekulakization, excluding the subsequent famine, at between 530,000 and 600,000, including deaths in transit and in special settlements through 1953. The definition of "kulak" was arbitrary and elastic; official criteria were vague, and in practice the label was applied to middle peasants (those of average means who were not considered exploiters), those who resisted collectivization, clergy, former tsarist officials, and others deemed politically unreliable. One 1930 OGPU (Soviet secret police) report found that only 55 percent of those classified as "kulaks" in one region were actually peasants who met even the nominal economic criteria. The mass deportations provided the OGPU with a vast pool of forced labor that became the cornerstone of the Gulag system, along with contributing greatly to the collapse of Soviet agriculture that caused the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, including the Holodomor. Those classified as kulaks in 1930–1933 were again targeted during the Great Terror of 1937–1938 under NKVD Order No. 00447.