The 20th century was the most progressive and at the same time the most difficult period in the history of former Soviet states like Ukraine and Russia. Even the devastation that Russia experienced during the Tartar-Mongol invasion cannot be compared with the tumultuous events that these countries underwent in the 20th century.
Undoubtedly, this century brought us scientific and technical break-throughs, the creation of powerful industry and the beginning of space exploration. But weren't the human losses greater than the gains? Didn't we pay too much for these apparent achievements?
History is full of absurdities. At the beginning of the 20th century our country was under no threat from anyone - and then all of the sudden we were hit with three revolutions and the Russo-Japanese war. The country needed a respite. However, the government delivered another death-blow to the population: collectivization and the subsequent elimination of kulaks, or rich peasants, as a class: i.e., dekulakization.
I had heard about kulaks from my grandparents and was eager to know what that funny word meant. Unfortunately, I was too far removed from the thinking of those times of death and human tragedy.
If we refer to a dictionary, we learn that the word kulak means fist in Russian. Another meaning is "miser or penny-pincher" or in the final analysis "landlords of rural Russia".
A short trip into history shows that in Feudal Russia land was split into long narrow strips; each family of serfs tended two strips side by side: one for the landlord, the other for itself.
After serfdom was abolished in 1861, the land the serfs had once cultivated for themselves was now owned by peasant communes, which consisted of groups of peasants who had once worked under a common landlord. The landlords retained those strips of land that the serfs had tilled for them - which remained in strips next to the now communal land. The landlords also kept all of their forests and pastoral lands. For their part, the peasants were originally burdened by compensation payments to their former landlords (for the land they had obtained from them) or went into debt to buy seed or farming equipment. Under these conditions, the kulaks were born, who one way or another accumulated more than their former fellow serfs - sometimes buying or leasing land from their former lords and themselves becoming landlords to other former serfs who couldn't survive on their allotted plot of land.
The peasantry - about 80 per cent of Ukraine's population - had fought pitched battles against landlords during the 1917 revolution to achieve its age-old dream of owning the land it worked on.
When communism began its inexorable march through Russia and Eastern Europe, the first areas brought under communist control were rural areas. When in 1918-1919, the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine and made their first bid to collectivize peasant land, the Ukrainian peasants resisted so fiercely that Lenin ordered "severe punishment" of any Bolshevik who preached collectivization. Instead vague promises of land reform were made. During the 1920s, peasants organized voluntary cooperatives and agriculture thrived.
Stalin's policies in 1929 brought this golden era to an end. Once Stalin felt secure in his position as leader of the party, he began to outline his plans for the USSR. The USSR held tremendous potential in terms of human and natural resources, but both were very undeveloped. Stalin believed that under a five-year economic plan, the USSR could industrialize and become stronger than any nation in the West.
Unfortunately, the USSR was made up mostly of peasants who farmed small plots of land. Therefore, to make the plan successful, he would need to make changes to the peasant way of life. Two things were required of the peasants by Stalin: they would have to be taxed heavily to pay for his new factories and, secondly, would have to produce even more food for all of the new factory workers in the cities.
In 1929, Stalin announced the collectivization of all farms in the country. This meant that hundreds of small farms were forced to unite into larger ones, and the peasants had to work together in order to make the bigger farms successful. The new farms were supposed to receive new tractors and other modern equipment to help modernize and increase the production of food.
Stalin wanted all of the country's roughly 100 million peasants to join his planned collectivization program, although he realized that they would not necessarily like the new system. The people most likely to resist the change would be the ones with the most to lose. In the USSR, the kulaks were the richest farmers. They owned two or more horses, several cows and had larger farms than most peasants.
Many peasants showed their displeasure with collectivization by not planting crops or by killing all of their animals. Stalin had hoped to eliminate the problem of food production, but the opposite had happened. Lack of food became a major problem in the cities because of the peasants' resistance to collectivization. Stalin was forced to send the police into the countryside to raid farms for food. Ultimately, the army was used to force the peasants to work and send food to the cities. Furthermore, as punishment for not collectivizing, the farmers were given little or no food. Mass starvation occurred during this period, with close to 30 million peasants starving to death.
The solution for Stalin was too simple! Kulaks were to be liquidated as a social class. By using his powerful secret police, Stalin murdered, exiled to Siberia and robbed kulaks who resisted collectivization of their property.
Here is what some eyewitnesses to collectivization have written: "Barefoot and poorly clad peasants were jammed into railroad cars and transported to inhospitable regions like Murmansk and the like. Peasants were disembarked into snow two metres deep in subzero temperatures. Without even an axe or a saw, we began building huts from tree branches. In two weeks, all the children, the sick and the elderly had frozen to death."
But what gave rise to this sort of punishment?
The word kulak conjures up the image of a rich, greedy peasant. Unfortunately, the reality differs greatly from the myth. Indeed, of 120 million Soviet peasants in 1927, 10 million were so-called well-off kulaks, while the remaining 110 million lived in poverty. Before the revolution, this latter group had lived in the most abject poverty. The origin of the wealth of the kulaks was supposedly based on the poorly-paid labor of these less-well off peasants.
Some peasant households did, of course, have more land than others. But these households also had larger families to support. But when the poor peasants began to join together into collective farms well before the revolution of 1917, the main source of kulak wealth disappeared. Thus, by the 1920s, Kulaks couldn't be seen as rich landlords. Most of those who employed labor in the countryside were war invalids, widows or families with few children.
When the campaign against the kulaks began, the Soviet regime was at a loss for a definition of the term and produced an arbitrary set of criteria. For example, a household owning a motor of any kind was classified as belonging to the kulak category.
The campaign against the kulaks, therefore, had little to do with economic redistribution. Dekulakization was intended to rid the countryside of peasants (irrespective of their material standing) who were most likely to organize and lead resistance to forced collectivization.
According to official Soviet sstudies, Ukraine had 71,500 kulak households in 1929. But according to official Soviet sstatistics, between 1930 and 1932, 200,000 kulak households or one million people were eliminated. The plan for the destruction of the kulaks was overfulfilled by over 10 times!
The policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class undermined the country's agriculture, as the richest segments of the peasantry were eliminated. At the same time, many rural traditions were lost, because the peasantry which had maintained them came under fire. More importantly, the country lost much of its manpower. Due to Stalin's policy, Russia and Ukraine fell behind other European countries, which considerably aggravated the consequences of World War II.
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