On This Day in History: January 30

Classicide against the Kulaks

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Genocide is a commonly known term, but what about classicide? Kulaks were not a race or an ethnicity. It was a name the Soviet Union used in the othering of “prosperous peasants.” What made them so prosperous? Owning a mere eight acres of land. If you had that, you were in deep shit. Stalin was coming for you.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 30, 1930--

I get that fascism sucks, but since people love extremes there are plenty who believe the opposite end of the political spectrum is the answer. Communism can and has been just as murderous. It sure as shit was for the kulaks.

The program had the not-so-friendly name of dekulakization. In 1928 the USSR implemented its first five-year plan outlining the nation’s economic policy, and the kulaks would be made victims. The demonizing propaganda had done its work. Kulaks were said to be enemies of the people, “hesitant” supporters of the revolution. Lenin referred to them as “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers.” Yeah, the people who owned eight fucking acres of farmland were the problem. If you had a couple of cows you were also considered an upper-class piece of shit ripe for extermination. Continues below …

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And extermination is what happened for many. The dekulakization program done in the interest of going full commie and having the state own the land began in 1917, right after the revolution. But Stalin kicked it into high gear in 1929. On January 30, 1930, the Politburo made it official with a resolution titled “On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization.” The word “elimination” was a harbinger of doom for the kulaks.

As part of the program all kulaks faced one of three possible fates: 1) just up and shot in the fucking head or thrown in prison because the secret police said so; 2) sent to Siberia or maybe Kazakhstan as forced labor, after the government took all your shit; 3) evicted from your land then made into slave labor in the same district. The goal was “elimination of the kulaks as a class.” All because they’d been a little more prosperous than the average Russian.

It’s a tactic as old as time. Governments create enemies for their followers to despise to distract from the leadership’s own horrible misdeeds. The U.S. Republican party is a master of this strategy; Trump created followers who would eat shit if it meant they could breathe poop breath on a liberal. Arab nations don’t give much of a shit about Palestinians except as a useful tool to demonize Israel. China and Cambodia conducted classicides similar to dekulakization to gain a stranglehold over their peasantries.

The process of dekulakization was one of mass death. Not just from executions, but starvation and disease. Conservative estimates are that half a million died, but some proclaim the death toll may have been 10 times that. Not satisfied with that bit of mass murder, Stalin quickly followed it up with the Holodomor, the purposeful starvation of several million people in Ukraine.

Image translation reads Kulak Bloodsucker: “Why do I care about the hungry?”

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