The construction of the foundations of socialism in the USSR took place in several stages. In order to destroy the remnants of capitalist relations, the proletarian state began with the nationalization of enterprises, after which it proceeded to industrialize production and reform agriculture. The process of collectivization in the countryside in the 30s of the last century gave rise to a phenomenon that was called "dispossession".
Who are the fists
Collectivization provided for a radical breakdown of the previous economic relations in agriculture. It was required to eliminate the remnants of outdated relations in the countryside, and was also necessary to replenish the state budget. Without this, it was impossible to carry out the rapid and large-scale industrialization of the Land of the Soviets. The essence of collectivization was the transition from individual to collective farming.
Strong peasant farms have survived from the previous capitalist system in a country that went through a revolution and a civil war, in which the labor of hired laborers - farm laborers - was relatively widely used. The heads of such farms have been called kulaks in Russia since the end of the 19th century. The Soviet state set before its local executive bodies the task of ruthlessly eliminating the kulaks, since the existence of this social stratum prevented the complete elimination of exploitation.
The kulaks in the Soviet Union were equated with the bourgeoisie, which, as many knew from the course of political literacy, amassing its untold fortunes through the merciless predatory exploitation of the working masses. As long as the centers of capitalist relations remained in the countryside, there could be no talk of the victory of socialism. This was the ideological basis of the repression that unfolded in the Soviet villages.
How was the dispossession
The campaign for dispossession of strong individual peasant farms began in the late 1920s, although the decree of the Party Central Committee on measures to combat the kulaks in areas of mass collectivization was issued in January 1930. Measures to eliminate the class of rural rich people were designed to prepare the basis for attracting peasants to collective farms.
During the first two years of repression, several hundred thousand individual farms were dispossessed. Food stocks accumulated through the exploitation of other people's labor, livestock and other property of the kulaks were subject to confiscation. Wealthy peasants were deprived of their civil rights and whole families were evicted to remote regions of the country. The confiscated property was transferred to the collective farms created in the village, but there is information that some of it was simply plundered by those who carried out measures to "cleanse" the village from the kulaks.
After the first wave of dispossession of kulaks, the second stage began, during which the middle peasants, who sometimes owned only poultry and one cow, began to be equated with the kulaks. In this way, proactive activists tried to achieve the normative indicators for dispossession established at the top. There was even a term "under the fists". This was the name of individual middle peasants and poor peasants who somehow did not please the local authorities.
By 1933, the process of dispossession was suspended by special directives of the government, but locally, by inertia, it continued anyway. Over the years of repression, the Soviet countryside has lost not only the exploiters, but also many independent and enterprising owners. The stage of widespread involvement of peasants in collective farms began, which became the main form of agriculture in the countryside.
