There have been many tragic events in the life of Russian society, but none of them can compare with the genocide of the Russian peasant in the process of collectivization.
The resolution of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on January 30, 1930 "On measures to liquidate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization" provided for the exile to uninhabited places of wealthy peasants who did not agree with the policy of the Soviet state.
A political act unprecedented in its cynicism can be compared to a criminal offense, when without legal grounds, only by decision of an illiterate rural asset, wealthy peasants were deprived not only of all their property, but also of civil rights and freedoms.
Who is a "fist" from a legal point of view
There was no clear definition of "kulak", and a really prosperous peasant with a really strong economy, and just an individual farmer who took advantage of hired labor during haymaking or other field work, could fall under it.
The reason for dispossession could be the personal enmity of the responsible persons, who often do not know how to sign the document. The widespread illiteracy of rural activists, who for the most part were not the most respected strata of village society, added chaos and lawlessness to the process and did not make the collective farms popular.
An attempt to define at the legislative level the concept of "kulak" was made in the Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of May 21, 1929 "On the signs of kulak farms in which the Code of Labor Laws should be applied." The category of kulaks included well-to-do peasants using hired labor, having agricultural machinery and equipment for processing agricultural products, and engaged in trade.
Dekulakization as a state policy in the agricultural sector
The purpose of dispossession was the need to free the agrarian sector from individual farms, which supported the entire economy of pre-revolutionary Russia. The socialization of personal property, in fact, the complete liquidation of the peasant household, could not but cause discontent among the majority of the peasantry, which led to large-scale unrest.
If at the first stages of dispossession of the kulaks, the main method of fighting the so-called kulaks was eviction to uninhabited lands, then mass protests against Soviet power gave rise to the use of exceptional measures, that is, the physical destruction of the disaffected.
Consequences of the fight against the kulaks
In all documents of the period of collectivization, attention was focused on the "class of the kulaks" as an object of liquidation. However, from the very beginning of the struggle, the treatment of representatives of the "class" did not raise doubts that a whole layer of the Russian people was being liquidated.
Under the influence of the state mechanism based on the most severe repression, most of the truly talented farmers were physically destroyed along with the phenomenon of kulaks. Collectivization was successfully completed, and along with it, the Holodomor began in the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, on the Volga - in the territories bled by dispossession of kulaks.
