Over the course of my research into the processes and plans for globalization, particularly those publications dealing with the apparent need for the world to transition to a “low carbon economy,” a common theme has emerged in the form of what is often referred to as “transformative change.” Though the specifics are rarely mentioned, it is frequently urged that practically every conceivable area of the human experience will be required to undergo such a transformation; if not to “save the planet” then because the gods of “progress” demand it. From immaterial structures like the global economy or various sectors and industries, such as the financial sector; to the core elements of day-to-day life such as what food we like to eat, the career we wish to have, even the company we choose to keep; whether we like it or not, radical and “transformative” change is, apparently, coming down the pipes, and all that remains for us to do now is to get used to the idea.

Most often, the calls made for this apparently-inevitable transformation to be embraced with open arms are accompanied by slight, concessionary acknowledgements that the process will not all be smooth sailing; that there will surely be some “difficult” times or “challenging” issues to be dealt with somewhere in the journey. Without fail, however, such admissions are then followed by a parade of reassurances that every bump in the road will be well worth the trouble at the end of the day. As I do not personally believe it possible for one to accurately predict the future, I have a very hard time sharing in their enthusiasm. In fact, “radical transformation” is one of those phrases when, spoken by anyone who may actually have the means of bringing it about, tends to send shivers down my spine: This is the language of utopianism, one of the deadliest ideas in human history.

Change, of course, is not always bad; it is often necessary to make changes to a given system or practice in order to improve it, or to adapt to changes in the environment in which it functions. Radical, or “transformative” change, on the other hand, has rarely (if ever) resulted in largely positive outcomes. Usually, the thing undergoing such change is something of a complexity that may not be immediately apparent and/or of such fundamental importance to a society’s survival, that any modifications to its functioning should be made very slowly, and very carefully — the consequences of failing to do so may very well prove disastrous. If one wishes to shorten a tower of blocks without knocking it over, the obvious thing to do would be to take the blocks from the top of the tower, not the bottom. And yet, in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the state thought it wise to radically transform its agricultural sector by doing precisely that: Shortening the tower by knocking out the bottom, in the form of a process called “collectivization.”

Collectivization in the USSR largely took place during the period of the first so-called “Five Year Plan” (1929-1939) and, as the name suggests, was primarily concerned with “collecting” (seizing) privately-owned land and livestock so that it could be put to “proper use” by the Soviet state under their new, innovative agricultural plans. The theory behind all this was that having peasants concentrated on a communal farm, rather than individual plots, would allow for greater, more efficient production of the various crops that were needed to keep the rapidly-industrializing urban centers well-fed. Naturally, the process necessitated dealing with some folks that you may have heard of, known as the kulaks, a term which is often translated into English to mean “wealthy peasants,” but this is something of a misnomer.

Kulaks were only “wealthy” in the comparative sense: Broadly speaking, these were the peasants who had done well enough for themselves to purchase more livestock and land; in some cases, kulaks acted as employers for the landless labourers in their village, whom they’d pay to help them work the fields. Make no mistake, kulaks were far and away from living in the lap of luxury: Like any other peasant they spent their days toiling in the fields, covered in sweat and dirt, oftentimes miles away from anything resembling “civilization” as it would have looked like back then. Unfortunately for them, owning land as a private individual is incompatible with Marxist doctrine, and marks one as bourgeois irrespective of reality. As such, the kulaks had to go; their “unearned wealth” to be appropriated for the use of the incoming collective farms. This process was termed dekulakization.

It is important to understand the story of the kulaks for reasons beyond that of basic, historical interest. One reason is that the kulaks serve to demonstrate one of the earliest instances of the “Robin Hood Mythology” — stealing from the rich to give to the poor – being exploited by elite ideologues as justification for inflicting pain, suffering and death upon a section of the population, which said elites used as scapegoats to take the public’s attention away from their own misdeeds. Another reason is that, in the globalized world of today, we in the West must wake up to the fact that we are not operating with the same understanding of “the rich” and/or “wealthy” as are the globalist ideologues. While the Occupy protests may have railed against the concentration of America’s wealth among the “1%”; in global terms, we are the 1%. For example, as true as it may be that homelessness is a situation that the vast majority of us would prefer to avoid, it is undeniable that one would most likely prefer to be homeless in Canada or America than to be homeless in say, Syria or Afghanistan. Neither situation is ideal, but one is comparatively less ideal than the other. Again, the key word here is “comparative” and, compared to the rest of the planet, the vast majority of Westerners are living in the lap of luxury, even if they are living below the poverty line of their own country. The poverty that we know of here bears little resemblance to poverty elsewhere.

Consider the following: In 2010, Goldman Sachs estimated there to be some 1.7 billion people on the planet that could be designated as having a “middle class” income. Sounds great, but do you know what they consider that income range to be? According to them, an annual income of between $6,000 and $30,000 USD (around $8,000 to $40,000 CAD, at the time of writing) is considered “middle class” (World Bank, 52). The sinister implication here is that anyone making more than that would be considered “upper class,” AKA “wealthy” or at the very least, “well off.” Sinister, because no one punching slightly above that line would agree with such a classification: No one, in the West at least, when calling for heavier taxes on the rich, has someone making $31k – $41k a year in mind; in fact, many of those making such calls fall within this bracket themselves. When I asked some of my colleagues, all of whom would qualify as “middle class” under the Goldman Sachs definition of the term, how much they thought one would have to make to be considered “upper class,” almost all of them said $100k (CAD), at minimum — after telling them Goldman Sachs’s opinion on the matter, all were as shocked as I had been to hear of this re-definition. In many respects, what may make some sense on the global scale is absolutely baffling from a more localized perspective. And what’s more, if $31k a year is “upper class,” then what of the million-and-billionaires of this world — such as, perhaps, those at Goldman Sachs?

Though we need not yet worry about this classification being applied in real terms (at least for the time being), I bring this up because it is, in essence, precisely the kind of definitional maneuvering that was used to justify the seizure of property and outright killing of the kulaks, the so-called “wealthy peasants” who were, of course, slated for destruction by those who were effectively the wealthiest of all, peasant or otherwise. At least, that’s how it started: As we will see, the category (or “class”) known as kulaks only became larger over time, eventually morphing into little more than a slur used to designate the “undesirables” among the peasantry at large. Remember that, in practice, the only Bolsheviks being subjected to similar treatment were those who had fallen out of favour with the elite — otherwise, they could reasonably expect only better treatment, despite the massive wealth disparity between them and the kulaks, the supposed “true enemies of the people.” Far from “stealing from the rich to give to the poor,” the Soviet practice was much more along the lines of “stealing from the comparatively rich to make almost everyone just as poor.”

As much as its proponents tend to bleat on about how “real” socialism has “never been tried,” one cannot help but notice the high degree of similarities that all such “not real” attempts appear to share. The scapegoating of essentially any population except for those actually causing the problems – the ideologues – is one of these recurring characteristics; as it is in other forms of repressive, totalitarian regimes. Misery loves company, and the Soviets certainly proved quite dedicated to ensuring that misery never felt lonely.

*

Collectivization was never going to be, nor perhaps ever intended to be, a smooth or peaceful transition between one system to another; that it was intended to be carried out across the world’s biggest, primarily agrarian country in just five years served as a prediction of the initiative’s ultimately chaotic and deadly manner of execution. That being said, the draft of the first collectivization decree from the Politburo, issued early in December of 1929, stressed the importance of not relying on brute force alone, so as to avoid pushing the peasantry into open rebellion against Soviet officials. Rather, it was intended for peasants to come to accept the new status-quo more-or-less willingly; the assumption being that, over time, they would be forced to acknowledge the apparent superiority of collectivized farming over that of the old way of doing things. As such, pitting the peasants against each other – the more-prosperous against the less-so – became an integral part of the propaganda campaign to convince the peasantry to “make the switch,” so to speak.

Less than a month after this decree, however, spurred on by concerns from higher-up that “easing” the peasantry into the communes would not allow for the process to be completed within the five-year time frame, much of the initial warnings against the use of force in the process was either eliminated entirely within the text of the “revised” decree issued in January, 1930, or largely displaced by the “greater” concern of there any attempts by the peasantry to “hold back the development of the collective-farm movement.” (Viola et al., 175) With little more than vague guidelines and “recommendations” to assist them, those Soviet officials charged with overseeing the mass-scale collectivization process were essentially left to their own devices in achieving the absurdly-high targets for the campaign as set by the Politburo.

Up to this point, collectivization had been achieved primarily through coercion and competition between different regions and districts (i.e., villages would compete for prizes to see who could collectivize themselves first). Beginning in 1930, the peasants — the majority of whom, it should be noted, did not yet have access to the type of equipment needed for large-scale agricultural production, such as tractors — would have to surrender their private holdings to the communes in short order, whether they liked it or not. The kulaks, of course, standing to lose the most from the process, had already been rebelling against this “slow form” of collectivization; thus its sudden, rampant acceleration provided a perfect excuse for Soviet officials to “address the kulak problem” head-on. The decision was made to first target the kulak households of the villages; to transfer their property to the collective farms before the much smaller holdings of the other villagers, in order to ensure their functionality from the get-go. Resistance from the kulaks in any form was to be punished by exile or by arrest (most often, this lead to execution), while the bulk of them were to be utilized as forced labor for the remainder of the Five-Year Plan’s period — then, they would be permitted to live among their fellow peasants on the communes, as “equals.”

As trouble in the countryside began to escalate, peasants who were fearful of falling under the “kulak label” turned to ridding themselves of their “excess” possessions in advance of their region’s collectivization. While some simply sold their property and fled, others, aware that the stability of the collectivized system relied upon the transfer of their crops and livestock to the communes, preferred to slaughter and eat said livestock in protest rather than hand them over. Some even burned their stores of grain, a crop already in massive shortage across the USSR. This angered the Soviets, of course, and so the campaign against the kulaks, their “liquidation as a class,” accelerated in kind. Central authorities began demanding information from regional officials regarding the names, numbers and locations of the kulaks in their respective areas, and a deadline of March-April was set for ultimate resolution of the “kulak problem.”

In their preparations for doing so, the Soviets actively sought to recruit the poorer and/or landless local peasants and labourers in the fight against the kulaks; the idea being that the poorest villagers would be the most hostile toward the wealthiest and, as such, would willingly cooperate with the confiscation of the latter’s property. As village soviets (here meaning “union” or “committee”) were increasingly established as part of the collectivizing process — and attendance made mandatory for all but the kulaks, who were banned from such meetings — they were as well tasked with identifying the kulak-owned buildings and land that were to be expropriated at a later date, with the groups of poorer villagers leading the charge. This, too, was framed by the central government as a “competition” between villages to see who could get rid of their kulaks the fastest. This did not always go according to plan, of course: Russia had begun industrialization much, much later than the rest of Europe; as such, even in the 1930s it was still quite common for families in a particular village or district to have been living alongside one another for countless generations. With ties running so deep, many peasants were hesitant to turn their backs on their fellow villagers and did so only under threat of execution. There were some, of course, who either bought into the anti-kulak propaganda or simply sensed an opportunity for personal enrichment; these opportunists were all too eager to loot the homes of their kulak neighbors, looking for property to “confiscate” — oftentimes setting aside family heirlooms and other valuables for themselves, as payment for their trouble.

The OGPU (then the secret police) was put in charge of the coming exile en masse. Their working definition of kulak, however, was far more broad than that of the Politburo: Alongside actual kulaks were included active and former white guards, active members of church councils and other religious associations, moneylenders, land speculators, former landlords, and some others (Viola et al., 211); all of whom were slated for the prompt “liquidation” of their assets, the incarceration of heads of households and, finally, exile to the outer reaches of the USSR. Inevitably, the dekulakization process began to get somewhat ahead of itself: Egged on by regional authorities and lacking coherent direction from the Politburo, various regions across the USSR began the deportation of their kulak populations at a rate faster than what could be reasonably managed and absorbed by their areas of destination. This came in direct conflict with the OGPU’s desire to keep the ultimate aims of the process more-or-less secret, so as to mitigate the problem of the kulaks destroying their property before disappearing; the sight of hundreds of kulak families piled up at railroad stations was sure to raise some suspicion. But it was precisely owing to this secrecy that many local authorities were given little to no guidance as to how to properly proceed with the deportations. Amidst the madness, categories of peasants whom had been explicitly excluded from the process by the Politburo — namely, poor and “middle” peasants, as well as the families of Red Army soldiers — were also being subject to liquidation and deportation in a frenzied bid to fulfill the Politburo’s specified quotas. Though kulaks had been estimated to compose just 2.3% of peasant households, the deportation quotas for each region varied between 3 – 5%, thereby necessitating that some substantial number of non-kulak families be swept up in the process. Owing to the overzealous nature of the program’s execution, by the time the first phase of collectivization had ended some 10 – 15% of all peasant households were estimated to have undergone dekulakization (Polian, 70).

This higher-than-anticipated population of supposed kulaks created further problems in the areas where they were exiled to, as the majority of these frost-bitten, remote areas lacked the necessary housing and infrastructure to accommodate what was often three times the amount of exiles they’d been expecting. Additionally, it was not uncommon for families to have their possessions rifled through and confiscated a second time, while en route to their destination in filthy, tightly-packed train cars; as a result, many families arrived with far fewer clothes, cookware, food and other supplies than they’d been permitted to take with them at the start of the journey. Thousands of exiled families filed complaints with the authorities claiming to have been falsely dekulakized; practically none of them would ever be repatriated to their villages of origin. [1] Kulak or not, the vast majority of these “special settlers” were to be left stranded on their islands, lost among the ever-expanding “gulag archipelago.”

Meanwhile, peasants continued to sabotage the coming collectivization by selling and destroying their own property; it soon became a matter of course for these rebels to be shot on the spot should local officials catch them in the act. As a result, some tens of thousands of “potential kulaks” fled the countryside for the perceived safety of the cities, while some others went as far as to seek shelter beyond the borders of the USSR, when possible. Some kulaks were discovered to be registering at employment centers and finding work in various industries, all with the help of the vast, interpersonal networks of zemliaks (peasants from the same districts) through which falsified, soviet-issued documents would frequently be passed. This posed a serious security threat to the OGPU, who feared that these “runaway kulaks” would inform the hitherto unaware city-dwellers of the growing catastrophe that was taking place in the countryside. Concerned that such a revelation would cause instability and rebellion in the cities alongside that already present in the rural areas, the OGPU were desperate to crack down on the now-booming business of selling false identification to fleeing kulaks. But while the secret police focused their resources on infiltrating the zemliak networks, the arbitrary incoherence that had come to characterize the collectivization process continued on unabated.

Ultimately, dekulakization morphed into a campaign against political, rather than economic, enemies. Any peasants who were resistant to collectivization, regardless of class, could find themselves slapped with the kulak label; thus facing exile at best, and execution at worst. As put by Viola et al., “Dekulakization became a cudgel to pacify the countryside and intimidate peasants into joining collective farms, as well as a means to stem the vast tide of property destruction. The result was mayhem, with violence escalating on both sides.” (215) Adding to the problem was that, in many regions, collectivization was occurring at the exact same time as the systematic closure of churches and the imprisonment or exile of the clergy; for some peasants, this two-front assault on their way of life provided enough impetus for them to resist the Soviet’s plans for them at any and all costs. Intense, large-scale rioting became a common means of doing so, and property destruction became even more widespread. Owing to the sheer size of the USSR and the remoteness of many villages, however, the central government could not receive information on precisely how bad the situation was until a week or two after the fact.

On the 10 of March, following a sudden deluge of reports detailing the horrors being inflicted upon the peasantry, the Central Committee issued a decree that the confiscation of livestock and the closure of churches were to be halted until further notice, and greater attention turned to the “economic consolidation” of those collectives that had already been established. But even where collectivization had been successful (at least, “on paper”), peasants began another form of protest by quitting the collective farms in droves — in the Moscow region, which had been subjected to a high degree of violent coercion over this period, the overall percentage of peasant households on collective farms plummeted from 73.6% in February to just 12.3% in April (Viola et al., 264). Rioting reached an all-time high in March, and it soon became apparent that a number of kulaks, as well as the families of Red Army soldiers who had been dekulakized (falsely or otherwise), had been sending correspondence to their army-enlisted and/or city-dwelling relatives, explaining what had been happening to them and, in the case of those with relatives in the army, appealing to them for help (many of whom would later be arrested for their “whistleblowing”). Just as the OGPU had feared, people were beginning to ask questions — central authorities had no choice but to put the collectivization program on hold until the following fall. The second phase began in September and ran all the way through to June of 1931, by which point collectivization was officially declared as complete. Dekulakization, too, picked up precisely where it had left off.

It was not until April 1st of 1930 that a state committee to oversee the transport, settlement and provisioning for the exiled kulaks was even established, let alone functional; at this point, it was much too late for the tens of thousands of people who had perished from starvation, illness or exposure to the harsh environment at their far-flung, “special settlements.” By the end of 1930, over 750,000 peasants in total had been banished from their homes and scattered across the wilds of Northern Russia, the Ural Mountains, and Siberia (Polian, 78). Throughout much of the year that followed, the continued dekulakization process had become completely divorced from the aims of collectivization, having fully morphed into the infamous, “forced migrations” of the Stalinist period. These massive population transfers were more often ethnically-based (though many of them, too, would receive the kulak label to designate them as “trouble”), and saw the large-scale deportation of countless ethnic groups from all over the USSR; most often for the purposes of forced labour in industries such as forestry or mineral extraction. In some cases, these families (or even entire villages) would be sent to regions far, far away from that which they had called home: Almost the entire population of Koreans in the Russian Far East, for example, were deported thousands of miles away to Kazakhstan over a period of several years. Despite the issuance of numerous decrees suggesting otherwise, in practice, such deportations continued on throughout the remainder of Stalin’s regime.

All in all, the years 1930-31 saw an estimated total of over 2 millions kulaks exiled to parts unknown to them; in both years, Ukraine topped the charts with a combined total of more than 63,000 kulak families banished from its territory (Polian, 83). Of the two million in total, an estimated 500,000 – 600,000 perished as a result of dekulakization — but calculating the death toll becomes far more complicated when one factors in the direct consequences that both dekulakization and collectivization at large had on the Soviet agricultural industry.

The kulaks, in the original sense of the term, were by-and-large not only the wealthier of peasants, but as well the most efficient farmers: Banishing them from their lands reduced much of the crop-growing capacity across the southern regions of the USSR; precisely where much of the country’s grain was grown. Owing to poor seeding and harvesting techniques that had been introduced by the Soviets, the harvest of 1932 was especially poor. The problem was exacerbated by the state’s overriding desire to keep the urban populations fed, leading them to take practically all of the excess grain produced by the peasantry — thus leaving them with very little to survive on over the coming winter.

Between the fall of 1932 and April of 1933, the total population of the USSR fell by 7.7 million people. Ukraine, having lost the most kulaks and otherwise being populated primarily by peasants, was the hardest hit by the famine: The brutality of this period, now known as the Holodomor, has been deemed by many scholars as constituting an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, 4 million of whom lost their lives. [2] Perhaps lesser known is the famine that occurred in Kazakhstan between 1930-33, owing not only to dekulakization and collectivization, but as well as a tragically predictable result of Soviet initiatives to force a traditionally-nomadic population to adopt a sedentary, agrarian lifestyle. Ultimately, between 1.5 – 2 million people, at least 1.3 million of which were ethnic Kazakhs, died as a result — this, too, has been argued to be an act of genocide. But all the while, as Soviet citizens quite literally starved to death in the streets, kulaks were continually being discovered, exiled, or executed — this time, however, these “wealthy peasants” were the ones caught stealing grain in a desperate bid to survive.

*

What happened to the kulaks in the Soviet Union was, sadly, far from an isolated incident: Two examples of similar campaigns against “wealthy” peasants (or those otherwise deemed to be “enemies of the people”) occurred in China preceding and during the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61, and in Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. In all cases, the terror that was unleashed was done so with the justification that the targets had acquired their wealth through exploitation alone; thus their “destruction as a class” was deemed necessary for a more “equal” distribution of property — in practice, of course, this meant only that everyone was left equally destitute; save for the elite, self-appointed cadre of “overseers” — the ideologues.

One of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, once wrote that “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” While this line may have been intended primarily as humor, some of what makes it funny, I believe, has to do with the bit of truth laying beneath it. Part of my own suspicion towards heavy state involvement in the very fragile ecosystem that constitutes the realities of everyday life, particularly involvement by scholars and technocrats who have no real experience in a given realm beyond their theorizing about it, comes as a direct result of knowing just how disastrous the results of such meddling can be, and have been. “This time will be different” (alternatively, “It can’t happen here”) is a terrible, deadly phrase that has been repeated so many times, in so many places, by so many different sorts of people, many of whom would later been proven wrong in the most horrific of ways; so much so that you’ll have to forgive me for clinging firmly to tradition when faced with the prospect of “transformative change” in any context, regardless of the claimed benefits. Soviet peasants were fed a similar line about the supposed superiority of the kolkhoz over traditional farming; when these attempts at persuasion didn’t work, they turned to violent coercion. But at the end of the day, regardless of whether any individual or family was on the commune willingly or not, the state’s ardent dedication to the idea of collective farming did not save those peasants from the consequences of its failure. Thus, it is critical that we retain a healthy skepticism towards radical ideas that come from anyone who does not stand to lose from its implementation — the very least we can do to honour the memory of those who have lost their lives to such things is to remember not only that they were lost, but why they were lost as well.

If there is any one, crucial lesson that can be learned from the story of the kulaks, it’s this: The kulaks were branded as enemies and punished accordingly; but with so many “non-kulaks” eventually meeting much the same fate as them — deported, starving, terrorized — what difference was there, really, between “the people” and their supposed “enemies?” Some peasants were glad to assist the Soviets in their confiscation of kulak property, but what good did that do them when winter arrived and the silos were empty? And this is not even mentioning the ways in which the very term was stretched-out over time, from something akin to “rural bourgeoisie” to little more than “anyone who resists.” This is the inherent problem with group-based justice, particularly that which is based on ultimately abstract, subjective notions such as “wealth” or “opinion” — who decides whom is “too wealthy?” Who decides whom has the “wrong opinion?” Who decides who’s enemy is whom?

Certainly, in this case, “the people” did not get to decide, even though so much of this horror was committed in their name — and none of those people who did decide starved to death during the famine of 1932-33, nor during any other famine, for that matter. Even many of those lower-ranking officials who had helped to round up the kulaks faced very little in the way of consequence for their complicity; though surely a number of them, too, would later be subjected to one of the many Stalinist-era purges that, in 1933, were only just beginning.

The year 2030 will mark one-hundred years since the events described here began to unfold. Will a century be long enough for us to learn from them, and to avoid a similar fate ourselves? Or will we still be finding kulaks even then, however it is that the term will be used? We cannot know for sure — perhaps, somewhere in the world, it is happening even now. The only certainties are these: If you are not part of the elite, then you will be the one suffering the consequences of their mistakes. If you are not part of the elite, then you will not be choosing who your own enemies are. And above all, if you are not part of the elite, then you will be part of “the people” — you may very well become “the enemy,” too.

Notes

[1] The few recorded instances of “false-kulak” families being sent back to their homes are those who had family members serving in the army. As mentioned, however, the ones whom had sent letters to said family members were typically arrested upon their return.

[2] The total death toll of the Holodomor remains disputed to this day, with estimates ranging between 3.3 million to 7.5 million deaths. I’ve chosen the 4 million figure based on Polian’s estimates (87) as a “middle of the road” compromise.

Sources

Polian, Pavel. Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004.

Viola, Lynne, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, eds. The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside. Trans. Stephen Shabad. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

World Bank. Vision 2050: The New Agenda for Business. World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2010.