Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of kulaks and their families in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government portrayed kulaks as class enemies of the USSR. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The campaign had the stated purpose of fighting counter-revolution and of building socialism in the countryside. This policy, carried out simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union, effectively brought all agriculture and all the laborers in Soviet Russia under state control. Hunger, disease, and mass executions during dekulakization led to at least 530,000 to 600,000 deaths from 1929 to 1933, though higher estimates also exist, with historian Robert Conquest estimating in 1986 that 5 million people may have died. The results soon became known outside the Soviet Union.
Under Stalin
announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929. Stalin had said: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes." The Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party formalized the decision in a resolution titled "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization" on 30 January 1930. All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:
Those to be evicted from their houses and used in labor colonies within their own districts
An OGPU secret-police functionary, Yefim Yevdokimov, played a major role in organizing and supervising the round-up of peasants and the mass executions.
Classicide of the Kulaks
In February 1928, the "Pravda" newspaper for the first time published materials that claimed to expose the kulaks: they described widespread domination by the rich peasantry in the countryside and invasion by kulaks of communist party cells. Expropriation of grain stocks from kulaks and middle class peasants was called a "temporary emergency measure". Later, temporary emergency measures turned into a policy of "eliminating the kulaks as a class". The party's appeal to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class had been formulated by Stalin: In 1928 the right opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still trying to support the prosperous peasantry and to soften the struggle against the kulaks. In particular, Alexei Rykov, criticizing the policy of dekulakization and "methods of war communism," declared that an attack on the kulaks should be carried out, but not by methods of so-called dekulakization. He argued against taking action against individual farming in the village, the productivity of which was two times lower than in European countries. He believed that the most important task of the party was the development of the individual farming of peasants with the help of the government. Increasingly, the government noticed an open and resolute protest among the poor against the well-to-do middle peasants. The growing discontent of the poor peasants was reinforced by the famine in the countryside. The Bolsheviks preferred to blame the "rural counterrevolution" of the kulaks, intending to aggravate the attitude of the people towards the party: "We must repulse the kulak ideology coming in the letters from the village. The main advantage of the kulak is bread embarrassments." Red Army peasants sent letters supporting anti-kulak ideology: "The kulaks are the furious enemies of socialism. We must destroy them, don't take them to the kolkhoz, you must take away their property, their inventory." The letter of the Red Army soldier of the 28th Artillery Regiment became widely known: "The last bread is taken away, the Red Army family is not considered. Although you are my dad, I do not believe you. I'm glad that you had a good lesson. Sell bread, carry surplus – this is my last word."
