[pepsionice]

This Kulak story is fairly interesting. With city and metropolitan growth around Russian in the late 1800s....the food chain was marginally working. So after they’d studied various programs around the world....they agreed to create private farms which the farmers....acreage based on number of males in the family....would get their own ‘land’.

Tied to this was the idea of introducing cooperatives which would help purchase local crops and transport into cities, where an abundant food chain was started up. Then they brought in agricultural experts to introduce new ideas to the Kulaks. Started in 1904, this was a fantastic program all the way to the 1917 Revolution, and then in the 1920s....started to hit the brick wall.

The issue became that smart and aggressive Kulaks had money-making farms, and ended up hiring other locals who just weren’t that smart or aggressive. The workers became angry at the success of the Kulaks, and the Communists exploited this frustrated situation.

So by the 1930s....to make the leser folks happy, the Communists seized the properties...shipped most of the Kulaks off to Siberia and helped to create a starvation situation for the next five to seven years in Russia. Who took over the Kulak farming operations and were unable to produce? The losers who whined about the Kulak bosses.

[Perseverando]

I read a definition of Kulak as a petit-bourgeois (The Black Book of Communism.)

[Scrambler Bob]

Dekulakization (раскулачивание) was responsible for the deaths of about 5 million subjects of the workers’ paradise. Robert Conquest, "The Harvest of Sorrow" has about 30 million Ukranians dying; maybe not all were Kulaks. Note that the minor Kulaks, sent to Siberia (the 'real' Kulaks were executed), prospered, to the dismay of the Soviets, and then had to be eliminated also.