Kulak in Russian means "fist," as in "you tight-fisted, miserly bastard," and it was originally simply a derogatory term for a dishonest person who grew wealthy trading grain.
But after the revolution of 1917, Bolshevik authorities appropriated the insult for class warfare – with grim results for any relatively well-off rural family.
Anyone who used hired labour, owned a dairy, or was suspected of being a "grain speculator", reasoned Lenin, could be accused of being part of the rural Bourgeoisie – and therefore an enemy of the revolution.
In 1918, during the bloody civil war that followed the revolution, Lenin himself infamously ordered party officials in Penza to "hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, filthy rich men, bloodsuckers."
But it was in 1929, when Stalin announced the "liquidation of the Kulaks as a class," that the term became synonymous with Soviet terror.
Over the next two years, around 1.8 million "kulaks" were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Urals and several hundred thousand shot. Meanwhile, millions of peasants were stripped of their property and forced onto state-run collective farms.
This brutal act of "classicide" was part of a collectivisation campaign that destroyed the agricultural economy and sparked an artificial famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine and other grain producing areas of the Soviet Union.
The policy was so obviously destructive that many historians believe mass starvation was a goal – not a side effect – of the campaign. In Ukraine, it is considered a genocide.
Interestingly, not everyone in the Communist Party was keen on the idea. What might now be called a Blairite wing fretted – rightly, as it turned out – that denying farmers the right to own property was not the best way to increase food production.
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Stalin was having none of it: "the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle," he declared. Doing so without stripping them of their property was nothing more than the "prattle" of "Right deviators."
Dekulakisation as a policy was formally abandoned in 1954, the year after Stalin died, when many deported "kulaks" were released. But it was not until 1991 that they and their descendants, with other victims of political repression, were formally rehabilitated.
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