pg. 6 - Peasants were accustomed to acting collectively and to making decisions among themselves about life in the village.

But this did not mean that the peasantry's conditions were wholly equalized. A handful of households in a commune would typically be better off than the rest; and the affluent peasants became known as kulaki (which in Russian means 'fists'). They lent money, they hired labor; they rented and bought land.

pgs 179-181 - .....It was laid down that the collective farms should be formed exclusively from poor and middling peasant households. Kulaks stood to lose the most from collectivization; they tended also to be more skilled and articulate than average. At least this is how Stalin saw things. He set up a Politburo commission to investigate how to decapitate kulak resistance. Its proposals were accepted by him and incorporated into a Sovnarkom decree of February 1930. Kulaks were to be disbarred from joining collective farms and divided into three categories. Those in category one were to be dispatched to forced-labor settlements or shot. Category two comprised households deemed more hostile to the government; these were to go to distant provinces. Category three consisted of the least 'dangerous' households, which were allowed to stay in their native district, but on a smaller patch of land. Between five and seven million persons were treated as belonging to kulak families.

The decree could not be fulfilled without magnifying the scale of violence. The Red Army and the OGPU were insufficient in themselves, and anyway the Politburo could not depend on the implicit obedience of their officers of rural origins. And so tough young lads from the factories, militia and the party went out to the villages to enforce the establishment of collective farms. About 25,000 of them rallied to the Politburo's summons. Before they set out from the towns, these '25,000-ers' were told that the kulaks were responsible for organizing a 'grain strike' against the towns. They were not issued with detailed instructions as to how to distinguish the rich, middling and poor peasants from each other. Nor were they given limits on their use of violence. The Politburo set targets for grain collection, for collectivization and for de-kulakization, and did not mind how these targets were hit.

A snag was that as they arrived in the villages, the '25,000-ers' saw for themselves that many hostile peasants were far from being rich. The central party apparatus imaginatively introduced a special category of 'sub-kulaks' who were poor but yet opposed the government. Sub-kulaks were to be treated as if they were kulaks. Consequently Stalin's collectivizing mayhem, involving executions and deportations, was never confined to the better-off households. The slightest resistance to the authorities was met with punitive violence. With monumental insincerity he wrote an article for Pravda in March, 1930, 'Dizzy with Success', in which he called local functionaries to task for abusing their authority. But this was a temporizing posture. For Stalin, the priority remained mass collectivization. By the time of the harvest of 1931, collective farms held practically all the land traditionally given over to cereal crops. Stalin and the Politburo had won the agrarian war.

The price was awful. Probably four to five million people perished in 1932-3 from 'de-kulakization' and from grain seizures. The dead and the dying were piled onto carts by the urban detachments and pitched into common graves without further ceremony. Pits were dug on the outskirts of villages for the purpose. Child survivors, their stomachs swollen through hunger, gnawed grass and tree-bark and begged for crusts. Human beings were not the only casualties. While the government's policies were killing peasants, peasants were killing their livestock: they had decided that they would rather eat their cattle and horses than let them be expropriated by the collective farms. Even some of Stalin's colleagues blanched when they saw the effects with their own eyes.

-excerpts from "A History of Twentieth-Century Russia", by Robert Service