"Green corn waves new chutes though planted not long ago, our brigadier sports new boots while we barefoot go."

~ Collective Farm Song, 1930's

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The words "Liquidation of Kulaks" carry few implications of human agony. It has an impersonal and metallic ring, but for those who saw the process at close range, the phrase is slated with horror. Despite the brutality of the Bolshevik Regime in Ukraine in 1920-21, Lenin was in charge, but never truly in control while he was in power. People from many villages were able to freely move around the country looking for work and take pleasure trips without anyone asking them for documentation or stopping them. The Soviet Union was in charge, but not in control, that was the general mentality before collectivization.

Most villagers owned their own houses and land, though the rooves were typically made of thatch and the plots were tiny. Few farmers possessed more than fifty acres, but most felt well off. Politics had remained loose and de-centralized, the Ukrainian government did not dictate in the 1920's if a school would be Ukrainian or Russian, that would be decided in the local itself. Villages were self governing, much as they had always been. Tensions between the Bolsheviks and the traditionalist peasants remained, but both sides usually worked to accommodate one another.

In the winter of 1929, a group of strangers entered the village of Miron Dolot, a large village of around 800 families with a church and central square. The strangers brought with them a very different set of ideas as how village life should be lived. Loose organization was to be replaced with strict control. Farmers would stop working for themselves and become laborers of the state for pay. Independence was to be replaced with strict regulation and above all, in the name of efficiency, collective farms owned jointly either by the commune or the state would replace ALL private farms.

As Stalin said in Siberia:

"The unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms, for us, is the only path."

Eventually, different types of collective farms would be created with differing levels of communal ownership, but most would require their members to hand over all private property from their homes to their livestock and horses and tools. Many people would be forced to live in a collective household or a barracks on the farm, they would eat their meals at a "collective dining hall". No one would own anything of importance, things like tractors were leased to the farms by the factories that created them. Often times, the collective farm workers would not be paid a wage, but rather a daily rate, usually in food and other goods instead of cash, and even then in small quantities.

All of this was supposed to be the result of an enthusiastic rural upswell. In November 1929, Stalin lauded the collectivization effort which he claimed was, "sweeping the country."

"Radical change has taken place in the development of our agriculture from small, backward, individual farming to large scale, advanced collective agriculture. To cultivate the land in common, the new a decisive feature in the peasant collective farm movement is that the peasants are not joining the collective farms as single groups as was formerly the case, but in whole villages, whole regions, whole districts and even whole provinces!

~ Joseph Stalin, Former Premier of the Soviet Union

In practice, the policy was pushed hard from above. In the week starting November 10th, 1929, the party central committee met in Moscow and "resolved to speed up the process of collectivization of peasant households". The same resolution also condemned the enemies of collectivization and expelled their leader, Nikolai Bukharin, Stalins' most important political opponent by that time, from the politburo.

A few weeks later, the peoples commissariat of agriculture declared that, "All the grain producing regions of the USSR would be collectivized within three years". The men and women that showed up in Dolots' village were the first tangible evidence of that new policy.

Traditionally, villages were broken up into three primary social groups. Bednyak, or poor peasants; serednyak, or mid-income peasants; and kulak, the higher-income farmers who had larger farms. The label of Kulak before collectivization was an innocent one that indicated the farmer had twenty-four acres of land or more, or could afford to hire labor. Under the rhetoric and policies of collectivization, Kulak became a term to denote someone as an enemy of the people as they would be unlikely to forfeit their worldly belongings to the state. Anticipating fierce resistance, Stalin ordered the liquidation of the Kulaks as a class and concidered them to be the potential leaders of any kind of revolt.

The state not only confiscated the land of the farmers classified as Kulaks, but also all of their possessions. It is forbidden by law to assist these enemies of the people.

Myroslava Utka was only seven years old when her father was taken away as a Kulak.

"In the winter of 1931, the came to evict us from our house. Activists, a group of people, if they could be called people, came into the house and looked over everything making us very frightened. Then they said, 'get out, this isn't your house anymore'. Mother wouldn't leave. 'At least let us stay the winter, where will I go with these children and old people?'. The men picked her up and threw her outside. A militia man stood guard at the door as mother yelled to us not to leave the house. One by one, the men threw us out of the house, all six of us."

~Myroslava Utka, Survivor From Dnipropetrovsk

A courageous neighbor risked deportation to give her family shelter.

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In large part, the number of kulaks kept increasing because Moscow said the numbers had to go up. Orders to liquidate the kulaks came with numbers and lists, how many should be removed, how many exiles, how many sent to the gulag system and how many resettled. Policemen on the ground were ordered to identify and detain kulaks and if they could not find them, then they created them.

Like the central planners of the same era, the OGPU, the Soviet Secret Police in Ukraine who replaced the Cheka as an organization, was nothing if not ambitious. Of all the grain growing regions of the USSR, Ukraine was expected to deliver the most kulaks. 15,000 of the most "die-hard and fanatic" kulaks were to be arrested, 30,000 to 35,000 kulak families were to be exiled and all 50,000 were to be moved to the northern district near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea.

On contrast, the kulak numbers from Belarus were 4,000-5,000 arrested, 6,000-7,000 exiled and 12,000 resettled. In the Central Black-Earth province, 3,000-5,000 were arrested, 10,000-25,000 were exiled and a total of 20,000 were to be resettled. The high numbers for Ukraine may have reflected the higher number of peasants there, it may have also reflected Moscow's perception that Ukraine's peasants remained their greatest political threat.

The need to meet these high numbers meant that anti-kulak rhetoric became more extreme over-time rather than laxing. As early as January 1930, an OGPU operative used the term, "Kulak white-guard bandits" to describe opponents of collectivization, thus not only stigmatizing the kulaks as class enemies, but national enemies. Agents of the "White Guard" and criminals. Language also quickly became more extreme on the ground.

In many cases, property was outright stolen. At one village in Kharkiv, twelve farms were "de-kulakized". On the particular day, a mob of 400 peasants carrying red flags marched towards the designated farms. They arrived, ripped apart the huts and took what they wanted. One of the mob leaders seized the hat off a kulaks head and the coat off his body and walked away wearing both of them. In another village, the collective farm and collective farm boss divided the stolen property between themselves. Some called this form of theft "War Communism" in a nod to the Bolsheviks past. At times, expropriation was fast and violent, other times it would be drawn out over months with more and more extreme pressures.

Some farmers burned their crops, killed their livestock and fled to the cities, but over the next three years, one million men, women and children are rounded up, jammed into box cars and shipped to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. The survivors of the exodus worked as slave laborers producing raw material to be exported to the west, this is the end of the line for many of the best farmers, cultural and political leaders of Ukraine.

Young party activists are brought in from the cities to push through collectivization. Anyone who opposes the measures in denounced as a kulak and deported, though resistance still came from all quarters. Not so long ago, the Bolsheviks gave land to the poor, now they want to take it away became the general mentality.

In 1930, Petro Grigorenko was one of the many students brought in to harvest the grain.

"There was rebellion, then sabotage. People would not give up. They attacked the local authorities, usually not killing them, only beating them up or kicking them out of the village. They took back their property, their horses, livestock and tools from the collective which had taken them. They took it all back. To crush the rebellion, troops were sent in. They would shoot over the peoples heads, but also at their heads. And their hearts."

~ Petro Grigorenko, Former Soviet General, Student During Famine

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1931, farmers crowd into the cities to sell heirlooms or anything else with value so that they could buy the bread that they had produced. To combat this, an internal passport system is introduced to deliberately confine them to their villages. Not only do all state quotas have to be met, but additional seed has to be set aside for sowing and livestock before the collective farm workers get paid. 80% of the collective farms failed to pay their workers anything at all, the new draconian policies prevented them from searching for work elsewhere.


The wheat was left standing in the fields, the demoralized farmers responded to the ruinous taxes and presence of troops by simply refusing to work. The grain quotas, or "taxes", are raised beyond what the independent farmer can realistically produce. Either they join the collective where the taxes are three times lower, or face exile as a Kulak. By mid 1932, three-quarters of all farm in Ukraine were collectivized. Then, in august, crippling new quotas are levied on the collectives themselves. Another exuberant quota is levied in October and another at the start of the new year.

The regime blamed the farmers for the food rationing in the cities, in reality, the Soviets were dumping tons of wheat on western markets. The 1932 harvest produced enough grain to feed all of Ukraine for two years, instead, famine ravaged the country.

"The kulak wants to crush our Soviet government with the bony hand of famine, we will bend this bony hand back on the kulak."

~ Stanislav Kosior, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party

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