Dispossession of fists. Dispossession - what is it? policy of dispossession in the USSR: causes, process and consequences. Softening the policy of dispossession

For the first time, she published materials exposing the kulaks, reporting on the difficult situation in the countryside and the widespread dominance of the rich peasantry, which was found not only in the countryside, exploiting the poor, but also within the party itself, leading a number of communist cells. Reports were published about the sabotage activities of the kulaks - revelations about how kulak elements in the position of local secretaries prevented the poor and farm laborers from entering local party branches.

The party's turn to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class was formulated by Stalin:

In order to oust the kulaks as a class, it is necessary to break the resistance of this class in open battle and deprive it of production sources of existence and development (free use of land, tools of production, rent, the right to hire labor, etc.). This is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. Without this, talk about ousting the kulaks as a class is empty chatter, pleasing and beneficial only to right-wing deviationists.

In 1928, the right-wing opposition of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was still making attempts to support the wealthy peasantry and soften the fight against the kulaks. In particular, A.I. Rykov, criticizing the policy of dispossession and “methods of the times of war communism,” stated that “the attack on the kulaks (must be carried out), of course, not by the methods of so-called dispossession,” and about the inadmissibility of pressure on individual economies in village, whose productivity is more than two times lower than in European countries, considering that “the most important task of the party is the development of the individual farming of peasants with the help of the state in their cooperation”

The right opposition also managed to declare support for individual farming at a meeting of the Plenum of the Central Committee: “To ensure assistance in further increasing the productivity of individual small and medium-sized peasant farming, which for a considerable time will still be the basis of grain farming in the country.”

Active measures to eliminate the wealthy peasantry were welcomed by the rural poor, who feared that “the party was heading towards the kulaks, when it was necessary to pursue the line of ‘dekulakization’.” The party noted that “the poor continue to view our rural policy as a whole as a sharp turn from the poor to the middle peasants and kulaks.” This is exactly how the least affluent villagers continued to react to the “new course” of the XIV Party Congress of 1925. Increasingly, the authorities noted among the poor “not only open, but also decisive opposition to the wealthy and upper middle peasants.”

The growing discontent of the poor was reinforced by famine in the countryside, for which the Bolsheviks preferred to blame the “rural counter-revolution” of the kulaks, who wanted to worsen the people’s attitude towards the party: “We must fight back the kulak ideology that comes to the barracks in letters from the village. The fist’s main trump card is grain difficulties.” Increasingly, ideologically processed letters from indignant Red Army peasants appeared in the press: “The kulaks - these fierce enemies of socialism - have now become brutal. We must destroy them, do not accept them into the collective farm, issue a decree on their eviction, take away their property and equipment.” A letter from the Red Army soldier of the 28th Artillery Regiment, Voronov, in response to his father’s complaint “they are taking away the last bread, they are not taking the Red Army family into account” became widely known: “Even though you are my dad, you didn’t believe a word of your sub-kulak songs. I'm glad you were given a good lesson. Sell ​​the bread, bring in the surplus - this is my last word.”

The need to take tough measures against the kulaks at the plenum of the regional committee of the CPSU (b) of the Central Black Sea Region was stated by its secretary I.M. Vareikis:

Mass repression

1. The immediate liquidation of the “counter-revolutionary kulak activists,” especially “cadres of active counter-revolutionary and rebel organizations and groups” and “the most malicious, terry loners” - that is, the first category to which were assigned:
   • The kulaks are the most active, opposing and disrupting the measures of the party and government for the socialist reconstruction of the economy; kulaks fleeing areas of permanent residence and going underground, especially those associated with active White Guards;
   • Kulaks are active White Guards, rebels; former white officers, repatriates exhibiting counter-revolutionary activity, especially in an organized manner;
   • Kulaks are active members of church councils, all kinds of religious communities and groups, “actively manifesting themselves.”
   • Kulaks are the richest, moneylenders, speculators who destroy their farms, former landowners and large landowners.
   The families of those arrested, imprisoned in concentration camps or sentenced to death were subject to deportation to the northern regions of the USSR, along with the kulaks evicted during the mass campaign and their families, “taking into account the presence of able-bodied people in the family and the degree of social danger of these families.”
2. Mass eviction (primarily from areas of complete collectivization and the border strip) of the richest kulaks (former landowners, semi-landowners, “local kulak authorities” and “the entire kulak cadre from which the counter-revolutionary activists are formed,” “kulak anti-Soviet activists,” “church members and sectarians") and their families to remote northern regions of the USSR and confiscation of their property - the second category.

The eviction of the kulaks was carried out not only by the GULAG bodies, but also by the OGPU, therefore the estimates of the GULAG bodies are noticeably underestimated. The department of the central registry of the OGPU in the certificate of eviction of kulaks from the beginning of 1930 to September 30, 1931 determined the number of “special settlers” at 517,665 families, 2,437,062 people.

Families resettled under “category 2” often escaped, since it was difficult to survive in undeveloped areas. In 1932-1940, the number of “fugitive kulaks” was 629,042 people, of which 235,120 were caught and returned.

If there are objections to my proposal to issue a law against the theft of cooperative and collective farm property and cargo in transport, please provide the following explanation. Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and strengthened if it had not declared the principle of private property to be the basis of capitalist society, if it had not made private property sacred property, violation of the interests of which is severely punished and for the protection of which it created your own state. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury the capitalist elements and individually greedy habits, skills, traditions (which serve as the basis for theft), which are shaking the foundations of the new society, if it does not declare public property (cooperative, collective farm, state) sacred and inviolable. He cannot strengthen and develop the new system and socialist construction if he does not protect the property of collective farms, cooperatives, and the state with all his might, if he does not discourage antisocial, kulak-capitalist elements from plundering public property. This is why a new law is needed. We don't have such a law. This gap needs to be filled. It, that is, the new law, could be called something like this: “On the protection of the property of public organizations (collective farms, cooperation, etc.) and strengthening the principle of public (socialist) property.” Or something like that.

Moreover, earlier at the conference of Marxist agrarians on December 27, 1929, Stalin announced dispossession as a measure necessary for the development and widespread implementation of collective farms:

Almost any peasant could be included in the lists of kulaks compiled locally. On the ground, middle peasants and “low-power peasants” were often dispossessed to ensure the accelerated pace of dispossession, as reported in a number of reports. At the plenum of the regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) of the Central Black Sea Region, its secretary I.M. Vareikis, when asked about the definition of the term “fist,” answered harshly: “Discussions about how to understand a kulak are rotten scholasticism, bureaucratic, aimless, incomprehensible to anyone, and, moreover, very harmful." Not only kulaks, but also many middle peasants joined in the resistance to collectivization. The Soviet government widely used the term “subkulak”, which made it possible to repress any peasants in general, even farm laborers. The so-called “tverdosdatchikov” were usually called podkulakniks. [ unknown term]

Reports on repressions were actively submitted to government authorities. For example, the representative of the regional committee of the Komsomol Central Choro Sorokin, during a meeting of the bureau of the Komsomol Central Committee, reported on the dispossession of a large number of middle peasants and the poor. It was reported that in the Black Earth Region, under the threat of dispossession by Komsomol members, peasants were forced to join collective farms, which the Komsomol leadership later stated: “the administrative methods of “dealing” dispossession, which hit the middle peasants, entered the brains of even Komsomol activists.” Borisoglebsk Komsomol members, in the process of dispossession, liquidated several farm laborers because the daughters of the owners married kulak sons.

A whole series of things were allowed to happen that discredited the idea of ​​collectivization; there were cases when Komsomol members took away boots, a sheepskin coat, a hat from a kulak, went out into the street, put all this on and felt at the height of the situation. There were cases when everything was taken away, even boots, while such large things as a mill and large means of production remained on the sidelines. There were cases of looting when people discredited themselves by taking things that we did not need.

In the Cheboksary region, several middle peasants and even poor peasants were “rashly” dispossessed. Dispossession took place without the participation of the poor-middle peasant gathering and while ignoring the village council. This dispossession ended with one of the dispossessed middle peasants in the Cheboksary region committing suicide. In the Gryazovets district, some village councils allowed the dispossession of middle peasants. The Hertsem village council took away property, livestock and houses from those, for example, who sold a cart of their bast shoes or several pairs of mittens.

Peasant protests against collectivization, against high taxes and the forced confiscation of “surplus” grain were expressed in its concealment, arson, and murder of rural party and Soviet activists, which was regarded by the state as a manifestation of “kulak counter-revolution.”

Number of victims

According to a secret certificate prepared in 1934 by the operational and accounting department of the OGPU, about 90 thousand kulaks died en route and another 300 thousand died from malnutrition and disease in places of exile.

Policy easing

True, demands for mass evictions from villages and the use of acute forms of repression still continue to come from a number of regions. The Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars have applications for immediate eviction from the regions and territories of about one hundred thousand families. The Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars have information from which it is clear that mass disorderly arrests in the countryside still continue to exist in the practice of our workers. Collective farm chairmen and collective farm board members are arrested. Village council chairmen and cell secretaries are arrested. District and regional commissioners arrest. Everyone who is not too lazy is arrested and who, strictly speaking, has no right to arrest. It is not surprising that with such a rampant practice of arrests, the bodies that have the right to arrest, including the OGPU bodies, and especially the police, lose their sense of proportion and often make arrests without any reason... These comrades cling to outdated forms of work that are no longer appropriate new situation and creating a threat of weakening Soviet power in the countryside. ...circumstances create a new situation in the village, making it possible to stop, as a rule, the use of mass evictions and acute forms of repression in the village. We no longer need mass repressions, which, as we know, affect not only kulaks, but also individual farmers and some collective farmers.

At the same time, even this instruction stated that “it would be wrong to think that the presence of a new situation means the elimination or at least weakening of the class struggle in the countryside. On the contrary, the class struggle in the countryside will inevitably intensify.” Confirming this fact, the instruction nevertheless allows for a number of repressive measures on an individual basis and sets a strict limit on them. Convicted kulaks are sent to labor camps, the total number of prisoners is limited to 400,000 "for the entire USSR." :

By organizing the transfer of the majority of peasant producers from the poor class to collective farms and thus eliminating the state’s dependence on the private sector and individual farms, the government hoped to destroy the class of peasant kulaks, who had previously been virtually the only producer of bread.

The task of the final liquidation of the kulaks as a class and a complete transition to exclusively collective farm production was set by Stalin on December 27, 1929. The admission into collective farms of persons subject to dispossession and recognized kulaks was strictly prohibited.

To attack the kulaks means to prepare for action and to hit the kulaks, but to hit them in such a way that they can no longer rise to their feet. This is what we Bolsheviks call a real offensive. Could we have undertaken such an offensive five or three years ago with the expectation of success? No, they couldn't. ... Now we have a sufficient material base to hit the kulaks, break their resistance, liquidate them as a class, and replace their production with the production of collective farms and state farms. ... Another question seems no less funny: is it possible to let a kulak join a collective farm? Of course, he shouldn’t be allowed into the collective farm. It is impossible, since he is a sworn enemy of the collective farm movement.

To speed up the pace of collective farm construction locally, “in a number of areas, voluntariness was replaced by coercion to join collective farms under the threat of ‘dekulakization’, deprivation of voting rights, etc.”

To combat “kulak and sub-kulak sabotage” on collective farms, in January 1933 the Party Central Committee decided to organize political departments at machine and tractor stations serving collective farms. 17 thousand party workers were sent to rural political departments because, as reported, “the open struggle against the collective farms failed, and the kulaks changed their tactics... penetrating the collective farms, they quietly harmed the collective farms.” Thus, dispossession was also carried out among collective farm workers, “former kulaks and subkulak members who managed to get into the collective farms for certain positions... in order to harm and cause mischief.”

To ensure the accelerated completion of the transition of individual peasants to collective farms and the deprivation of peasant kulaks of the means of production and the possibility of using hired labor, a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was adopted “On the pace of collectivization and measures of state assistance to collective farm construction” dated January 5, 1930 with a program of forced collectivization . It banned the rental of land plots, the hiring of labor by private individuals, and accelerated dispossession, including on the initiative from below. Private individuals (peasants) were given the right to confiscate livestock, tools, means of production, outbuildings and equipment in favor of collective farms. The result of the enforcement of this regulatory act and a number of by-laws was repression of hundreds of thousands of peasants, a sharp drop in the level of agricultural production and mass starvation. The sharp decline in agriculture was stopped only by 1937, but the indicators of 1928 were never achieved before the Great Patriotic War.

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation of persons subjected to dispossession and members of their families is carried out in accordance with the general procedure in accordance with the Law of the Russian Federation "" dated October 18, 1991 N 1761-1.

In the judicial practice of the Russian Federation, dispossession is regarded as an action that is political repression. For example, you can consider the Determination of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated March 30, 1999 No. 31-B98-9, which de jure is the practical enforcement of the legislative framework on the issue of rehabilitation of dispossessed persons:

The application to establish the facts of the use of political repression and confiscation of property was satisfied lawfully, since dispossession was political repression applied administratively by local executive authorities on political and social grounds on the basis of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On measures to eliminate the kulaks as a class" dated 01/30/1930, the restriction of the rights and freedoms of the applicant’s mother consisted of depriving her of housing, all property and voting rights.

A feature of Russian legislation in the field of rehabilitation is the possibility of establishing the fact of the use of dispossession on the basis of witness testimony, which the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation drew attention to in this definition:

According to the Federal Law of August 22, 2004 N 122-FZ. Part 2 of Article 7 of the Law of the Russian Federation “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression” has lost force.

Rehabilitated, previously dispossessed persons are also given back the real estate necessary for living (or its value), if it was not nationalized or (municipalized) destroyed during the Great Patriotic War and in the absence of other obstacles provided for in Article 16.1 of the Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” "

Notes

1. Stalin's de-peasantization. Policy. Practice. Price
2. Ruling of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated March 30, 1999 // “Bulletin of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation”, 1999, No. 7
3. STALIN'S STATE REPRESSIVE POLICY
4. Information from the Moscow Regional Court. “Based on the results of a generalization of judicial practice of consideration by courts in 1995-1997. cases related to the resolution of disputes regarding the rehabilitation of victims of political repression"
5. A. Arutyunov “Lenin’s dossier without retouching. Documentation. Data. Evidence.”, Moscow: Veche, 1999
6. Lenin V.I. Complete. collection essays. T. 36. P. 361-363; T. 37. P. 144.
7. A short course on the history of the CPSU (b) (1938) // Reprint reproduction of a stable publication of the 30-40s. Moscow, ed. "Writer", 1997

“I gave birth to you, I will kill you!”

N.V. Gogol

1. What is dispossession?

On January 30, 1930, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On measures to eliminate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization.” From this moment it is customary to count the beginning of one of the most dramatic events in the history of the pre-war USSR - dispossession, which still remains the subject of heated emotional discussions, especially since the memory of it is still alive in many families.

What was dispossession? From the side of the liberals we hear statements about a war against the peasantry, from the side of the Stalinist patriots - discussions about the suppression of kulak terror directed against the much-needed collectivization of the country. Let's leave ideology and emotions aside and turn to dry facts.

Dekulakization was considered by the state as a campaign to destroy the kulaks as a class. It was done as follows. Immediately after the decree was issued, in the territories where complete collectivization was carried out, special troikas were created, consisting of the first secretary of the district party committee, the chairman of the district executive committee and a representative of the GPU. They considered the question of whether this or that peasant belonged to the “kulak class.” The kulaks were divided into three categories: the first included the organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts and anti-Soviet uprisings; they were handed over to the GPU to determine the extent of their personal guilt, and their family members were evicted to remote areas of the USSR; the second included “a stronghold of the kulaks in the village”; they and their family members were also evicted to remote areas of the USSR. The third category included all the other kulaks, who, together with their families, were evicted outside the collective farm lands, but in their own area (that is, they did not end up in special settlements). The property of those evicted was confiscated and became collective farm property; the resettlers were entitled to only 500 rubles per family (from their own money) to settle in a new place.

The kulaks (mainly of the second category) and members of their families who arrived in a new place acquired the status of special settlers (later - labor settlers or special settlers). The number of special settlers included not only kulaks, but also antisocial elements evicted from cities (tramps, drunkards), as well as persons who had committed minor offenses, for whom the camp was replaced with a special settlement. They lived in special settlements built in areas where there was a shortage of labor, located no closer than 200 kilometers from borders, railways, cities and villages, mainly in the North, in Siberia or the Urals. They were engaged in forest cutting, mineral development, fishing, etc. The labor of special settlers was used in the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in the construction of mines, mines, and factories during the era of the first Five-Year Plan.

Formally, the special settlers were not prisoners, but they were subject to certain restrictions: they could not leave the special settlement without the permission of the commandant (appointed by the NKVD), they were threatened with a correctional camp for attempting to escape or refusing to work, they were not accepted into trade unions and the party, from their salaries were withheld to support the administration of the special settlement (which, by the way, included activists-special settlers); finally, they were deprived of voting rights. However, they also had benefits - first of all, until 1934 - exemption from all taxes and fees and the entire period of existence of special settlements - exemption from military service, including during the war. In this regard, during the war years there were cases when former special settlers, released, tried to get back, not wanting to end up at the front.

Since 1933, mass expulsions have ceased and, in fact, dispossession has ceased as a campaign on an all-Union scale. In the same year, the gradual return of civil rights to special settlers began. Since 1933, the state has returned voting rights to children of special settlers who have reached adulthood. Since 1935, children of special settlers who graduated from high school could leave the settlement to enter a technical school or university. Since 1935, voting rights have been returned to all former special settlers. In 1938 they began issuing passports to children of special settlers; in 1939 this decision began to apply to disabled people. In 1939-40 they began to release those “wrongly deported.” In 1938-41, according to decisions of local councils, former kulaks who had proven their loyalty to Soviet power through honest work were given freedom and could go home. The massive return of former kulaks from special settlements began after the war (however, they were replaced by “ethnic migrants” - Poles, Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tatars). By the end of the 1940s, a large number of dispossessed people returned to the center of the USSR as full citizens (although there were certainly cases of unspoken bureaucratic discrimination for their kulak past). Let us remember that the children of special settlers left the settlements even earlier, before the war. On August 13, 1954, a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR “On lifting restrictions on special resettlement of former kulaks and other persons” was issued, which meant the end of the era of dispossession.

In just 2 years of the campaign (1930-1932), about 2 million people were resettled, that is, about 400 thousand families or about 2% of the then population of the USSR. A certain number of migrants died during the resettlement itself and while settling in a new place. Thus, in 1933, according to the GULAG leadership, the mortality rate among kulaks resettled from the North Caucasus to Siberia was about 3% (it should be noted that the authorities were not interested in mortality among the settlers and the NKVD leaders themselves viewed this as a consequence of poor organization of resettlement due to sloppiness of officials). The authorities themselves admitted that during dispossession there were mistakes and those who were not dekulakization were declared kulaks, and made attempts to identify the “wrongly deported” and release them (although, of course, not everyone was released). A considerable number of kulaks managed to avoid repression and deportation by selling or abandoning their property and leaving for cities, where they pretended to be middle peasants or poor peasants. This “self-dekulakization” became so widespread that in 1932, as part of the passportization of cities and workers’ settlements, the police were required to identify “hidden kulaks” and evict them from cities (especially from Moscow and other regime cities).

2. For what?

This is the actual picture of dispossession. Now let's try to analyze it. In fact, the same word “dekulakization” was used to describe two different state campaigns, in each of which the term “fist” had its own special meaning (which is why kulaks were classified into categories). The first campaign was a military-police operation to neutralize and punish the organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts, that is, “kulaks of the first category” (which actually included all active village anti-Soviet activists, associating them with “kulaks” only due to the need to view the conflict through the prism of the official class theory). I understand that for many modern people, especially young people who learned history from textbooks published by the Soros Foundation, the existence of terrorism in the Soviet village of the 1920-193s will be a revelation. But if we look at the newspapers of that time, at the research of modern historians of collectivization, and finally at the OGPU documents of the late 1920s and early 1930s that have been declassified today, we will see: starting from 1927, there were regular reports from the field about the murders of communists , Soviet employees, police officers and even teachers who came from the cities. Statistics reported that in 1927, 901 cases of so-called “kulak terror” were recorded, and in 7 months of 1928 there were already 1049 cases.

By the way, terrorism is considered a serious crime everywhere in the modern world, regardless of what the motives of the terrorists are; so it is difficult to understand those anti-Soviet liberals who are trying to justify the figures of the “kulak terror”, as, for example, the odiously famous writer Druzhnikov tried to do in relation to Sergei and Danila Morozov - the murderers of the pioneer Pavlik Morozov and his younger brother Fyodor.

The second campaign is an operation to disband the “kulak class”, turning them into special settlers so that after “re-education through labor” they and their children will return to ordinary citizens of the Soviet country. Here, kulaks (more precisely, “kulaks of the second category”) were understood as members of individual peasant farms that separated from the peasant society (community), systematically using the labor of hired workers - farm laborers. Of course, in reality, simply wealthy peasants who used only the labor of their family members and even those who were not very wealthy fell into the category of such, especially if those administration officials who were involved in dispossession had personal scores to settle with them, but this was an expected and understandable aberration, associated with the “human factor”. Officially, the campaign was directed specifically against individual peasants who hired farm laborers, and the majority of those who fell under its skating rink belonged precisely to such people.

However, if the guilt of the terrorist kulaks was obvious - they committed such criminal offenses as murder, arson, beatings, which are strictly punished in any society, including a democratic one, then the guilt of all the other kulaks is not entirely clear. Modern liberals tend to brush aside this question altogether, believing that they had no guilt before the state and, moreover, they did not owe anything to the state. According to liberal denouncers of collectivization, the kulaks fell victim to the revolutionary utopianism of the Bolshevik leadership, which wanted to rebuild life in accordance with its theoretical principles. Stalinist patriots, in general, do not deny that there was no special guilt for the kulaks who did not participate in the struggle against Soviet power. Patriots just disagree that Stalin’s plans for collectivization were utopian and destructive for the village and the country. On the contrary, they prove that without collectivization, industrialization and victory in the Great Patriotic War would have become impossible. But here too the “kulaks” appear as victims, albeit necessary and justified from a historical perspective.

In reality, of course, this cannot be the case. If society believes that an entire social group, which included millions of people, suffered innocently from the repressive bodies of the state, then it will not trust such a state and will somehow oppose it (by the way, the Soviet people had such an opportunity during the Great Patriotic War, when the Nazis tried to play on the feeling of resentment against Soviet power). If society silently accepts what happened, then it means that it knows what this group was really punished for. Only this knowledge can be implicit, perceived by contemporaries as something self-evident, not needing to be spoken out loud and made a subject of comprehension. It exists as something that is understood by everyone without words and without hints, and therefore it is not written about in newspapers, not spoken on the radio or from high stands. When the era passes, the descendants, learning about events from written documents, deprived of this implicit knowledge, will rack their brains, trying to understand the logic of the state of this period and declaring that there is no logic there.

For what kind of guilt, which was known to contemporaries but not known to us, did the kulaks suffer? In order to understand this, you need to figure out when and for what purpose the social group of “kulaks” was created, which was subjected to repression in 1930-1932, and what it was?

3. Who are the “Soviet fists”?

This question may seem strange. Isn’t it constantly being told to us that the class of rural bourgeois farmers, or, as the Bolsheviks called them, “kulaks” (although in the Russian village not only farmers, but also rural moneylenders and, in general, all village rich people were called kulaks), no one created, but did it arise on its own, as the community decomposed and wealthy peasants emerged in it, who took over the land and means of production, and poor peasants, who turned into rural proletarians - farm laborers? Stolypin's reform, which allowed secession from communities and private land ownership, only provided a legal basis for the existence of the kulaks.

All this may be true, but the pre-revolutionary kulaks had nothing to do with those “kulaks” who were “dekulakized” and evicted in the 1930s. Experts in the history of the Russian peasantry unequivocally state: the old kulaks died - both as a class and even physically - in 1917-1921. In the summer and autumn of 1917, after the tsarist regime fell and the Provisional Government was unable to establish any firm power, the village actually ceased to be subordinate to the state. Russian peasants began the “black redistribution” that they had been dreaming about for several centuries. First, peasant communities appropriated 44 million dessiatines of landowners' lands, while burning the landowners' estates and killing landowners and members of their families if they did not have time to escape. Then came the turn of the “farmers” who once took advantage of the rights given to them by Stolypin’s reform and left the community, turning their plot into private property. At gunpoint and pitchforks, they returned to the communities, and their lands were socialized. The peasants expressed their demands in orders that formed the basis of the decree “On Land”, adopted by the 2nd Congress of Soviets and implemented by the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars. This decree proclaimed two fundamental theses:

1. “the right of private ownership of land is abolished forever”
2. “hired labor is not permitted.”

Thus, the decree “On Land” proclaimed the transfer of all land in Russia to the state and the right of collective farms (agricultural communities, communes, etc.) to use it, but only using their own labor. It is not for nothing that this decree was called the law on the socialization of the land. As we see, he laid out the legal basis for the destruction of the kulaks as a class. A kulak, after all, is a rural bourgeois who, having privately owned land, hires proletarian farm laborers to cultivate it, and if the land is no longer private property and hired labor is prohibited, then the existence of a kulak is impossible.

Those few kulaks who managed to preserve their farms and settlements even after the decree “On Land”, taking advantage of the state of anarchy that reigned during the civil war, were “dispossessed” and partially destroyed by food detachments and committees created by the Soviet government in 1918, which after After famine began in the cities, it took a decisive course to remove “grain surpluses from the hands of the kulaks and the rich,” as stated in the corresponding decree of 1918. Resisting, the kulaks organized armed uprisings against the communists or went over to the side of the whites, which ultimately led to the fact that almost all of them were destroyed by the end of the civil war. As historians note: “we can say with confidence that by 1922 there were no pre-revolutionary kulaks left in the Russian countryside.” The village entered the Soviet era with communal agriculture almost completely victorious (agricultural “societies” dominated, that is, old land communities, to which were added numerous communes, land cultivation partnerships (TOZs), etc.).

Where did fists appear again in the Soviet village? With the introduction of the NEP, the state is revising some provisions of agricultural policy. In 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a law on labor land use and a new Land Code of the RSFSR. According to this law, individual peasants (of course, together with their families) again received the right to separate themselves from the collective economy (community, commune, TOZ) and receive a separate plot of land, which was no longer subject to communal redistribution, but was assigned to a given family and for the cultivation of which peasant the farm could, under certain conditions, hire workers - farm laborers. These peasant families, “separated” from the community, soon turned into wealthy ones, largely due to the use of hired labor, and received the nickname kulaks, since they reminded the communal peasants of Stolypin’s choppers and farmers. The government, which thought in terms of class theory and sought to find bourgeois and proletarians everywhere, also recognized them as rural bourgeois, like the pre-revolutionary kulak farmers. However, if we look into the laws of the Soviet state of that period, we will find that they differed significantly from the rural bourgeoisie.

First and most important, they were not the owners of the land on which they lived and worked. The Land Code of 1922 clearly stated that all agricultural land belongs to the state and is under the authority of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture). The law declared peasants, including those who separated from the community, to be “land users” who were given the right to farm on state land indefinitely and free of charge. The state, represented by land authorities, gave them plots of land. This land could not be sold, bequeathed, donated, or pledged. An attempt to do this ended for the land user not only in criminal punishment, but also in the fact that this plot was taken away from his family forever. Renting was allowed in exceptional cases, for example, if, after the death of a family member, the family cannot independently cultivate the plot. However, the lease period was limited; the land could not be leased to those who use the labor of farm laborers.

Everything that he built and raised on this land (house, outbuildings, plants, livestock) was transferred into personal ownership to the separated land user, but there were restrictions: if the peasant gathering decided that the land user’s buildings interfered with the interests of other land users, he was obliged to demolish. Individual labor land users had the right, in cases of extreme need (for example, in case of illness of the owners and a shortage of workers), to hire workers on the basis of an employment contract, but only on the condition that members of the land user’s family also work along with the workers and that the worker’s remuneration is not lower than a certain minimum.

Also, all land users, including those who separated from the community, had the right to receive a special loan from the state bank. Preferential loans were specially provided for peasants for the purchase of livestock and equipment.

Finally, unlike employees of state collective farms, an individual land user was more or less free in economic matters, that is, he decided for himself: what and when to sow, etc. and so on.

The main responsibility of land users was agricultural cultivation of the land (if it stopped, the state took the land away from the land user) and payment of agricultural (food) tax to the state (the amount of agricultural products or its monetary equivalent strictly determined by state bodies). Until 1923, the tax was paid only on products, primarily bread. From 1923 to 1924 it was contributed partly by products, partly by money, and from 1924 - mainly by money. The tax was progressive, so most of it fell on wealthy land users and especially those using farm labor, that is, “kulaks.” Poor peasants were generally exempt from it and, moreover, received material assistance from the state. The peasants could sell the surplus remaining after paying the tax in kind on the market, but even here there were rules: the state bought bread at fixed low prices (since its goal was to provide the entire population of the country with inexpensive products). The state partially paid for agricultural products with industrial goods, which were also popular among wealthy peasants because their farms were often equipped with machines.

This was the social reality of that time, if you look at it not through the prism of ideology, but directly, perceiving things as they really were. Based on them, it is clear that the “kulak” in the village of the 1920s (or the individual labor land user, as it is more correct to call him and as the law called him) is not a bourgeois, that is, a private owner of the means of production, but a user or manager of state land , having certain rights and obligations given and assigned to him by the state. Among his rights, the most important is the right to more or less free labor cultivation of the land using farm labor only in the most extreme cases and provided that the kulak himself works on an equal basis with the farm laborer; Among his responsibilities, the most important is to hand over a significant part of the results of labor to the state or sell them at fixed prices.

4. Bukharin’s course of relying on the fist

In 1925, a discussion broke out in the party between two factions - the left, headed by L. Trotsky, and the right, headed by N. Bukharin. The left proposed a program of modern industrialization, that is, the rapid creation in the USSR of its own industry through high taxation of the countryside, and above all its most prosperous layer - the kulaks, while the right, on the contrary, proposed in every possible way to support the peasants and especially the wealthy in their desire to enrich themselves in order to ensure cities with agricultural products and gradually move to slow phased industrialization and slow collectivization of agriculture on a purely voluntary basis. The party majority and most importantly the “apparatus faction”, headed by Stalin, took the side of Bukharin and the right, which predetermined the collapse of the Trotskyists. This choice was not accidental. Behind Trotsky’s program of super-industrialization was his thesis about the impossibility of building socialism in a single country and the expectation of a speedy proletarian revolution in the countries of Western Europe, primarily in Germany. Stalin, as a sensible, realistic politician, did not believe in this prospect and, on the contrary, rightly believed that all the symptoms of a decline in revolutionary activity in Europe were evident. And this meant that it was necessary to somehow organize life in the Soviet country on our own, without relying on the help of the victorious German and French proletarians. This arrangement involved, first of all, providing cities with agricultural products and, above all, bread, and secondly, exporting grain abroad to purchase there the necessary technical means to begin industrialization.

Under these conditions, Stalin, believing Bukharin’s assurances, relied on the village “kulak” rather than on the community. There were, however, pragmatic reasons for this. Kulak farms, although considered individual, were in fact quite large farms. As a rule, peasants with many children became kulaks in the village; their families could consist of 20 people, since children and their families were not separated and remained to live in a common household with their parents. All of them were entitled to land, since according to Soviet laws, unlike pre-revolutionary laws, land was allocated according to eaters, and not according to souls, and women were also entitled to land. Thus, according to historians in the Urals, in the Trinity region, on average, kulak farms owned 16 dessiatines (and in real figures it reached 50 dessiatines), while the poor had an average of 8 dessiatines. Of course, this was less than that of land-based societies (communities), but for individualist kulaks the entire land could be several large fields, and for community members it could be small strips alternating with stripes of others (“interstriped”). This means that it was easier for the kulaks to use machines and mechanisms to cultivate the land and produce crops (not to mention the fact that they also had money to purchase machines and mechanisms). Indeed, in the 1920s, kulak farms were mechanized to a greater extent than communal and collective farms. It is no coincidence that in the 1929 decree “On the characteristics of kulak farms in which the Code of Labor Laws should be applied,” the presence of complex agricultural machines with mechanical engines was considered one of the important signs of a kulak farm. According to 1927 data, 3.2%; kulak farms had 21.7% of cars, while the poor in the village were 26.1% and in their hands there were only 1.6% of cars.

It is clear that in this regard, kulak farms were economically more efficient: the 3 percent kulak stratum handed over and sold to the state about 30% of all grain handed over and sold by the village.

For these reasons, Stalin supports Bukharin’s group, which has taken a course towards supporting the kulak. Of course, this course was not officially called that, but, as they would say now, more politically correct: “facing the village” and its slogan “get rich!” Bukharin formally addressed not only the kulaks, but also all peasants. But it was clear to everyone both in the country and abroad: this was precisely a course to support the kulaks. The Berlin organ of the Mensheviks, the Socialist Messenger, wrote about the party’s policy in 1925: “The government is turning its face to the strong peasantry, to the kulaks.” The ideologist of National Bolshevism N. Ustryalov wrote the same thing from his distant Harbin: “A little more, and we will perhaps see how the Order of the Red Banner will shine on the mighty economic breasts in the village: - Heroes of Labor! ... soon, just look, you will hear cheerful, full-blooded voices from the village: “Yes, I am a kulak, I am a Soviet kulak and I am proud of it!”

And it was very clear to the common man, especially the villager: the slogan “Get rich!” addressed specifically to the kulaks and to no one else. How can a poor or middle peasant individual, or even a rural community or TOZ, get rich, if how many workers they had, so many remain, and the mechanization of their labor is an unattainable prospect due to lack of funds? The kulak had every opportunity to follow Bukharin’s call, since he could increase the efficiency of his farm by hiring new farm laborers, and Bukharin’s faction met him halfway in this. Let us recall that according to the Land Code of 1922, although the use of hired labor was permitted (which, in fact, gave birth to the “class of kulaks”), it was significantly limited, since it could be resorted to only in exceptional cases, for example, when, due to the illness of family members, the yard cannot cultivate the land it has. However, in 1925, the Council of People's Commissars issued “Temporary rules on the conditions for the use of auxiliary hired labor in peasant farms” and instructions for them. These documents significantly expanded the rights of kulaks to exploit hired workers. Now kulaks could hire farm laborers not only in exceptional cases, but always, throughout the entire agricultural season, and the number of farm laborers per kulak was not limited. Of course, the rights of farm laborers were also stipulated in the law: in addition to the right to sign an employment contract and to a salary not lower than a certain minimum, which they already had according to the 1922 code, a farm laborer or farm laborer now received the right to insurance at the expense of the kulak, the right to one day off per week and on weekends on holidays, the right to one meal at the expense of the fist, to severance pay in case of dismissal without warning, to two weeks' pay in case of illness or childbirth, to membership in a trade union, etc. The law prohibited the labor of children under 14 years of age and the use of teenagers and pregnant women in heavy work. But with all the restrictions imposed on the kulak, the law was actually drawn up in his interests.

In addition, in the same 1925, a resolution prepared by Rykov, a supporter of Bukharin, was adopted, which reduced the agricultural tax by 40% and expanded the possibilities of obtaining credit for peasants. It is clear that these measures were to a large extent beneficial to the kulaks: since the tax was progressive, it was on the kulaks that it fell the heaviest burden (in fact, the poorest peasants were generally exempt from it), and they could afford to pay interest on loans only peasants with high incomes, that is, the same kulaks.

So, in 1925, the Soviet state turned its face to the kulak (a land user who separated from the community and used hired labor). A kind of agreement is concluded with him, not reflected in official documents, but understandable to each of the contemporaries of those events as “tacit knowledge.” The essence of the agreement was simple: the state allows the kulaks to enrich themselves by increasing the exploitation of farm laborers and, by the way, protects them from the wrath of the poor (since the poor part of the village perceived this law negatively and the anger at the kulaks was great and it could result in spontaneous reprisals against them). The kulaks, in turn, undertake to provide the city with agricultural products, primarily bread, at a fixed price favorable to the state and pay an increased tax (up to 25%). From the point of view of the state, the kulaks, having separated from the community and decided to hire farm laborers, by the very fact of this tacitly agreed to fulfill the terms of this unspoken agreement, because it was from the state that the kulaks received everything that made them agricultural producers and brought them profit - both land and the right to hire farm laborers . In the eyes of the state, this was not an agreement between two equal and free subjects, since the kulaks were actually state land users with their own responsibilities.

5. Kulak strike and kulak terror

Throughout 1926, this agreement was observed. But already in 1927, the kulaks began to disrupt the grain procurement plan. In the fall of 1927, the state managed to buy only 2.4 million tons of bread, compared to 58 million during the same period last year. The price offered for bread by the state did not suit the kulaks, in whose hands the main reserves of grain were concentrated. They did not need manufactured goods; peasants bought only tobacco, kerosene, matches, and soap in the shops, but they stocked up in plenty during the NEP period.

The kulaks had bread. In 1927 there was a good harvest in Russia. But they did not want to sell it at a low price to the state to provide for the city. They preferred to hide the grain so that the next year, when the state would be forced to raise prices, they could sell it at a higher price. If the kulaks sold bread, it was mainly to private traders, who in the city resold it at 50-100% more expensive.

The result of this was the urban food crisis of 1928-1929, which few people remember today, since this would somewhat spoil the good story that our anti-Soviet people repeat - about the evil Stalin, who never offended the strong owners. But for the townspeople of that time (and also for the rural poor, who were also affected by the kulak disruption of grain procurements) it was a shock. People have already lost the habit of queues and coupons, which seemed to be a thing of the past forever along with the civil war and post-war devastation. And suddenly, in the 11th year of Soviet power, when there is no war and no intervention, the cities again lack bread and bakery products, then other food products disappear from the shelves - meat, milk, tea, sugar, and finally food products. People are taking bakeries by storm (there have been cases of bread stores being destroyed). People stand in queues, in which a place must be taken early in the night. When food is delivered, fights begin, because most people still don’t have enough. The first to stand are speculators, who buy dozens of rolls, long loaves, and canned goods, and then sell them at exorbitant prices on the market. Along with city market traders, there are peasant kulaks - they have everything, but it’s terribly expensive.

Indignation is growing in the cities, letters from perplexed citizens are pouring into the Central Committee and the Supreme Council. Party oppositionists are distributing leaflets - Trotsky was expelled from the USSR just a year ago, Trotskyist factions in party organizations are numerous and strong.

The population of cities demands the introduction of a card system in order to somehow defeat speculators and have a guaranteed piece of bread. Locally, cards were introduced already in 1928, and on February 21, 1929, this practice extended throughout the country. First, cards are introduced for bread, then for other products, including potatoes. Of course, rations are very low: in Moscow and Leningrad, workers in 1929 received 900 grams of bread every day on ration cards, their family members - 500 grams, in the provinces - even less. A worker was entitled to 100-200 grams of meat or fish per day; butter, milk, and eggs were mainly given only to children. Food cards were not issued for free: 1 kg of wheat bread cost 20 kopecks in the early 1930s, rye bread - 9 kopecks (but of course this was nothing compared to the prices of speculators). Card holders were divided into categories, the most received were workers, who were given cards of the 1st category, then co-workers - holders of the 2nd category, then pensioners, the unemployed, who had the 3rd category. The “disenfranchised” – former nobles, priests, etc. – received nothing at all. A network of public catering was created - canteens, often closed, for employees of a certain department, where they could get lunch at a reduced price; canteens were opened in factories and institutions: people came there with their whole families.

Stalin is very worried about this situation. There is a widespread point of view, shared by both Stalinist patriots and anti-Soviet liberals, that Stalin needed collectivization and dispossession to carry out accelerated modernization. This opinion was expressed back in the 1930s by Stalin’s implacable enemy, Trotsky, who reproached the leader of the USSR for “stole”, by modifying, his idea of ​​super-industrialization. I.V. Stalin categorically disagreed with such statements. In his famous night conversation with Churchill, Stalin explained the need for collectivization: “... in order to get rid of periodic hunger strikes, Russia had an absolute need to plow the land with tractors. We had to mechanize our farming.” I think it was so; what frightened Stalin most of all was the famine in the cities. As a man of the older generation, Stalin remembered very well that the fatal events of 1917, when the entire empire collapsed overnight and bloody chaos established itself in its territory for 4 long years, were provoked by the same kulak strike. In 1915, an economic crisis began in Russia, which had already been waging a grueling war for a year. Although there was a good harvest, the peasants, and especially the kulaks, did not want to sell grain to the state at a low price. To avoid starvation in the cities and undersupply of the army, the tsarist government... introduces surplus appropriation and creates food detachments, which were tasked with confiscating 772 million poods of grain from the peasants (it’s only semi-literate liberals who argue that surplus appropriation was introduced by evil communists, as we see, and the tsarist The ministers did not see any other method to supply the city and army with bread). However, the surplus appropriation was disrupted due to the corruption of tsarist officials. Unlike the Bolshevik commissars, they? Having received a bribe from the kulak, they gave him a certificate stating that due to poverty he was not subject to surplus appropriation and the city was left without food. The February Revolution, by the way, began with lines of hunger in Petrograd, whose warehouses ran out of food. This was apparently what Stalin was thinking about when he was informed about the food queues in Moscow in 1928. The foreign policy situation was turbulent; there was factional struggle in the party. A year ago, on November 7, 1927, the Trotskyists demonstrated in Moscow and openly declared their desire to take power. Although Trotsky was already exiled abroad, his supporters remained in the party. Moreover, the kulaks responded to the attempt of the Soviet government to take away grain by force with terrorist acts and uprisings.

The proposal of Bukharin and Rykov to make a concession to the kulaks, to increase purchase prices to a level that suited the kulaks, was unacceptable to Stalin. He quite rightly believed that if the state did this, it would forever become the object of kulak blackmail and would never solve the food problem (not to mention the problem of industrialization). And not solving this problem means losing power and again plunging the country into chaos. The solution consisted in reform in agriculture, or rather in refusing to rely on the kulak, who turned out to be an extremely fragile ally, and in relying on collective farms. The kulak failed to cope with the role of a state-appointed land user, obliged to supply the city with agricultural products and therefore he must answer for this. And not individually, but as a class, because not individually, but as a whole class, the kulaks received from the state in 1922 and 1925 special rights, which became the key to their enrichment. The state by legislative acts of 1922 and 1925 formed the social stratum of post-revolutionary “kulaks”, therefore the state had every right to disband this stratum.

Dispossession looked in the eyes of the absolute majority of Soviet people of that time (naturally, except for the kulaks themselves and their relatives) as a completely fair and justified campaign. Moreover, the campaign is also humane in its own way, no matter how paradoxical it may sound today. After all, firstly, the kulaks, for their attempt to strangle the state with the bony hand of hunger - the very state that gave the kulaks the opportunity to get rich - were only deprived of their rights and, after staying in special settlements, returned to normal life (for the children of the kulaks, this return was even much more earlier - in the late 1930s). AND? secondly, by evicting the kulaks to remote areas, Stalin actually saved them and their family members from extrajudicial killings by the rural poor, which had already begun throughout Russia. The poor were extremely embittered against the former “masters of life.” A lot has accumulated here - the grievances of former farm laborers, and hatred of wealth acquired not only by one’s own, but also by others, and revenge for kulak terror, and, finally, a simple understanding that, if not for the disruption of grain procurements by the kulaks, which caused famine in cities, collectivization could begin much later and be much less painful. Contemporaries understood this, but descendants have already forgotten about it.

Notes:

1. see about this I.E. Zelenin “Revolution from Above”: completion and tragic consequences // http://www.rus-lib.ru/book/35/36/36-2/028-040.html

2. see V.N. about this. Zemskov Special settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960. M., 2006 http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2005/0211/biblio01.php

3. The fight of the OGPU bodies against peasant terrorism in the conditions of the crisis of grain procurements and collectivization of agriculture // http://www.chekist.ru/article/2095

4. http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/DEKRET/o_zemle.htm

5. E. Starikov Society-barracks: from the pharaohs to the present day. Novosibirsk 1996 –S. 370

6. http://kadastr61.ru/biblioteka/7-kodeksy/116--30-1922.html

7. Alexey Rakov Social portrait of a dispossessed person in 1930 http://xxl3.ru/pages/articlef.htm

8. http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/sie/9021/KULASTVO

9. See historian V. Rogovin talks about this attachment:/159/i.html

10. Niklay Valentinov Heirs of Lenin http://m.tululu.ru/bread_54231_203.xhtml

11. Ustryalov N.V. Get rich // Ustryalov N.V. National Bolshevism M., 2003 – P. 341

12. http://www.consultant.ru/online/base/?req=doc;base=ESU;n=5448

13. http://www.consultant.ru/online/base/?req=doc;base=ESU;n=20209

14. Osokina E.A. The price of the Great Leap Forward. Supply crises and consumption during the first five-year plans // http://you1917-91.narod.ru/osokina.htm

15. Card system in Kazan in the 20-30s http://su-industria.livejournal.com/35995.html

By the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union was still a predominantly agricultural country, with the rural population larger than the urban population and agricultural products and natural resources the most profitable parts of state exports. After several years of the restoration period of the NEP, the authorities took up the implementation of one of the program tasks for the new state - large-scale modernization, which in the Soviet Union was of an “accelerated” and “catch-up” nature( And ).

One of the first shock waves of collectivization was the policy of “dekulakization”, “an attack on the kulaks in the countryside,” somewhat later reformulated into “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class”: “ This was the first attempt at large-scale social engineering on the part of the Communist Party, and it was the beginning of Stalin's mass terror.". Thus, 10 years after the revolution, the notorious “land question” was resolved, which had been a bargaining chip in the struggle for the sympathy of the peasantry for many decades.

The term “kulak” itself, during the second half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th, evolved along with the social system in the state, repeatedly changing its meaning, implying various connotations - from brightly negative to neutral, and then again negative - already under the Soviet authorities - to the point of complete rejection of the very kind of people called “kulaks”.

In the most general sense, a “kulak” is a wealthy peasant, the rural bourgeoisie. Often this is a respected, wealthy member of the rural community. To some extent, he can be compared with an American farmer - the owner of his land, living through its rational use. Negative features to the appearance of a peasant kulak are added by the indispensable “use of hired labor” (farmers and the village poor) for their own agricultural needs. This “exploitation” itself (often economically beneficial to both the employer and the hired worker) was condemned mainly from ethical and moral positions.

Lenin in his works gave various, often mutually exclusive definitions of the peasant “kulak”, for example, this: ““kulak”: every peasant who collected grain with his labor and even without the use of hired labor, but hides the bread, turns into an exploiter, a kulak, a speculator". The first years of Soviet power were marked by numerous speeches by committees of the poor (“bed committees”), equipped with sufficient powers to destroy kulak farms. Created to help the state “take grain surpluses from the hands of the kulaks and the rich,” the committees emphasized class antagonism in society, which, largely thanks to the efforts of the Soviet government, was resolved primarily with weapons in hand.

At the same time, the first period of a large-scale “offensive against the kulaks” (1927-1929) was characterized by a strict division of the peasants into “kulaks, middle peasants and poor peasants”, and the ideological and literally physical blow had to be delivered precisely to “ kulaks" - wealthy village"exploiters". The events of the first half of the 30s blurred this line - the traditional peasantry was destroyed - and it was to be replaced by a collective farm. Thus, the transition from private property to “socialist” property, declared from the very first years of Soviet power, turned out to be violent and artificially imposed “from above” (and could hardly have been otherwise, as shown by the unsuccessful attempts at state “socialization” in the villages of the early 20s) .

The defeat of the kulaks, and then the peasantry as a whole, was dictated by both economic and ideological reasons. By the time the NEP was winding down, there was a serious grain procurement crisis in agriculture (the state received an insufficient amount of grain through the traditional “tax in kind”), which prevented the implementation of the notorious “grain” task: “we won’t finish eating, but we’ll take it out.”

“The grain factor played a crucial role in the dramatic developmentvillage events throughout 1927. The myth of grain abundance, withcreated through exaggerations unimaginable in statistics, should have convince the ruling elite (and thereby the main society headed by them) military force - the Bolshevik Party) in the possibility of obtaining suchamount of grain, which finally provided a solution to the problem of fundsfor accelerated industrialization, to strengthen defense..." .

Statistics data on grain breads 1926-1928, found in the archive of the outstanding Soviet statistician P.I. Popov (the full version of these data, which should have been compiledUnfortunately, it was not preserved by the expert council at the Central Statistical Office of the USSR)indicate the presence of supposedly 896 million poods of “invisible reserves” of bread among peasants (for comparison, the official annual supply of bread is a little more than 1000 poods). Figures of this kind were intended to demonstrate the need for additional “pressure” on the village, and within the village - on the kulaks, who turned out to be the causes of all the troubles - the lack of bread for sale, the food crisis in the cities, and hunger in the village itself.During the most active 5 years of collectivization, the authorities repeatedly used this statistical trick - artificially inflating the economic results of the first five-year plan, the number of peasant farms that joined the collective farm, thereby spurring the pace of forced modernization.

Bread obtained through confiscation was used for the needs of industrialization - it was sold abroad at dumping prices, in exchange for machines, technologies, and funds for inviting foreign specialists. According to numerous testimonies of residents of large cities (according to secret reports of the OGPU),the food situation in them by 1929, when cards for almost all food products returned, was even worse e, than during the years of war communism and the Civil War. Forced modernization assumed the construction of a new economy at the expense of the most competitive Soviet “good” - bread, the maximum reduction in the cost of labor (corrective labor camps), powerful propaganda and agitation.

Ideologically, “dekulakization” is a scholastic concept; in post-Soviet historiography, the term “de-peasantization” is also used, since very soon any peasant who, for one reason or another, was disliked by the authorities, could fall under the definition of “kulak.” The number of victims was also greatly increased by the infamous "" (August 7, 1932), as well as the mass famine in the Volga region, Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932-1933.

The period of “complete collectivization” (1930-1932)put an end to the “fist” both in the terminological and literal sense. The authorities in the USSR destroyed the traditional peasant way of life along with its bearers. By the end of 1931, about 2.5 million people were resettled to the northern regions of the USSR(including family members of “kulaks” convicted under the first paragraph of the decree “on the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” i.e., executed). The new agriculture in the country of socialism was supposed to be exclusively collective farm.

“The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” not only became a prototype of future ethnic cleansings of the Nazi regime, but also reflected the deep essence of the Bolshevik understanding of Marxism. Dissident V. Bukovsky gives an example from the field of psychiatry: “I remember during a psychiatric examination there was such a test to identify idiocy. The subject was asked the following task: “Imagine a train wreck. It is known that during such a crash the last carriage suffers the most. What needs to be done so that he doesn’t get hurt?” A normal idiot is expected to offer to unhook the last carriage. This seems funny, but think about it: are the ideas and practices of socialism much smarter? In society, socialists say, there are rich and poor. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - what to do? Uncoupling the last carriage means destroying the richest, depriving them of their wealth and distributing it to the poor. And they begin to uncouple the cars. But every time it turns out that some carriage is still the last.”

Literature and sources.

1. The tragedy of the Soviet village, T.1-2; T.1 Collectivization and dispossession. May 1927 - November 1929, T. 2 November 1929 – December 1930. M., ROSSPEN, 1999-2000.

2. Soviet village through the eyes of the Cheka - OGPU - NKVD. 1918-1939. Documents and materials in 4 volumes. Volume 2. 1923-1929. M.: ROSSPEN, 2000.

3. Society and power. 1930s: Narration in documents / ed. A.K. Sokolova. M., 1998.

4. Changes in the social structure of Soviet society: 1921 - mid-30s. M., 1979.

5. Vishnevsky A.G. Sickle and ruble. M., 1998.

6. Gregory P. Political economy of Stalinism. M., 2008.

7. Fitzpatrick S. Stalin’s peasants. Social history of Soviet Russia in the 30s, M., 2001.

8. Stalin I.V. "On the question of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class."

9. Agricultural Encyclopedia, First Edition. Ch. ed. V.P. November 1929 / Ed. V. Danilova, R. Manning, L. Viola. – M.:"Russian Political Encyclopedia" (ROSSPEN), 1999, p.7.

The Russian Academy of Sciences. Institute of Russian History. Federal Archival Service of Russia. Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. Central Archive of the Federal Security Service. V. Danilov, R. Manning, L. Viola “Collectivization and dispossession. Documents and materials in five volumes. 1927-1939".

Bukovsky V. “And the wind returns...” M.: New publishing house, 2007. – 348 p. – (Free Man), p.91.

The October Revolution of 1917 was not only a sharp turn in the historical path of Russia, but also turned the lives of ordinary people far from politics upside down. The fire of the revolution burned even the peasantry, and the best part of it - hardworking people, but, according to the new government, irresponsible, who did not want to understand why

For what?

In the 1930s, a large-scale campaign to dispossess the village was launched. The authorities saw the wealthy peasants (“kulaks”) as the enemy of the people, because they had something to lose. At the state level, a norm was set at 60 thousand people arrested and 400 thousand people expelled, but the OGPU, headed by G. Yagoda, provided data already in the first years of the program that exceeded those originally stated. The Soviet government did not stand on ceremony with dispossessed peasants.

Families most often did not suspect that they were blacklisted for eviction and lived normal lives. Special teams for working with fists could show up at a house at night and distribute all family members in different directions: some to the North, others to Siberia or Kazakhstan. Those who resisted were shot on the spot. The Soviet government created support for itself in the form of collective farms; the self-sufficient, strong economy of the kulak was an obvious obstacle.

How I met Siberia

The Narym region became a haven for hundreds of thousands of exiled peasants. In Soviet times, there was a saying: “God created Crimea, and the devil created Narym.” The nature of this region speaks for itself: impassable swamps and swamps, around which the tributaries of the Ob flowed, from which it was impossible to get out. For such settlements, fences with barbed wire were not built; escape was comparable to suicide.

What did you eat?

Half of the people died from hunger and disease on the way to Siberia, but no less died on the spot. Due to lack of preparation, life in the taiga became a real challenge. People often died from eating poisonous mushrooms or berries. Sometimes, hunger led to extremes.

The Nazim tragedy was an indicative case of what people went to when they found themselves in conditions of survival. After the exiles landed, almost on bare ground, near the village of Nazino, cases of cannibalism were recorded. People, driven to despair, resorted to murder. This fact was kept secret by the Soviet authorities for a long time, but among local residents the name “Island of Cannibals” was assigned to this village.

Where did you live?

Once the peasants were dropped off on the banks of the river, they were faced with nothing but wild, uninhabited terrain. Some built houses from branches and fallen trees, which looked more like huts. Others dug dugouts and holes in order to somehow protect themselves from the weather. If the family survived the winter, then by autumn barracks were erected for the survivors.

Local authorities were not prepared that the number of exiles would reach half a million people. There were neither means nor money to provide basic conditions for all those who arrived. For every thousand people, relatively speaking, three axes and three saws were issued. If it was possible to put together a wooden house, then 40-50 people lived there.

Medical assistance also existed only in official reports for Moscow. In fact, it was a great success if the paramedic (one per thousand people) lived in a local village and did not have to travel hundreds of kilometers. The clothes were only those that they had time to change into when leaving the house. If a relative died, then everything was taken from him and distributed among others. Frostbitten limbs were common; the harsh climate of Siberia made it impossible for the weak to survive.

In conditions unsuitable for life, peasants were required to work almost a 12-hour working day. The state, thus, fulfilled ideological tasks and, at the same time, developed the taiga territories with the hands of free labor. It is noteworthy that one of the most famous exiles of Narym was I.V. Stalin, sent there in 1912. After being a prisoner for no more than a month, he escaped and only then became actively involved in the revolutionary movement of the Russian Empire.

BONUS

Image caption The grain for the dictatorship of the proletariat cost about half a million lives

80 years ago, a campaign of terror and expropriation of the wealthy peasantry, which went down in history as “dekulakization,” unfolded in the Soviet Union.

Some modern researchers prefer to call it “de-peasantization.”

During one of the allied conferences of the Second World War, Stalin said to Churchill, who came to him with condolences over the enormous human losses of the USSR: “We lost no less during collectivization.”

“I thought so, because you were dealing with millions of little people,” Churchill remarked.

“With ten million,” Stalin answered. “It was all very bad and difficult, but necessary. The bulk of them were destroyed by their farm laborers.”

How many people were actually affected?

Image caption Strong owners became the main target

"Fists" were divided into three categories. The heads of families falling into the first category were arrested as “malicious counter-revolutionaries” and sent to camps, and their families to settlements. The second category went to “cold regions” with their fathers, the third was allowed, after the confiscation of property, to get a job in factories and construction sites.

Accurate data is available only on the number of those shot, arrested and exiled, since the GPU had, one way or another, established records.

The initially established quota of 60 thousand arrested and 400 thousand deported was exceeded many times.

In a resolution on the report on the progress of arrests dated February 15, 1930, OGPU chief Genrikh Yagoda demanded that his subordinates temporarily leave the “priests and merchants” alone and focus exclusively on the “kulaks.”

2 million 926 thousand 884 people were sent to settlement, of which in 1930-1931 - 2 million 437 thousand 062 people.

The difference between the number of exiles and those who arrived at the place of exile was 382 thousand 012 people.

The very first re-registration in January 1932 revealed a “shortage” of another 486 thousand 370 dead and fugitive people.

Dekulakization is a political repression applied administratively by local executive authorities on political and social grounds on the basis of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 30, 1930 “On measures to eliminate the kulaks as a class.” Resolution of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of March 30, 1999 .

According to a secret certificate prepared in 1934 by the operational and accounting department of the OGPU, about 90 thousand kulaks died along the way, another 300 thousand died from malnutrition and disease in places of exile, about half of them in 1933, when mass famine broke out in the USSR .

For active resistance to collectivization, 20 thousand 200 people were executed in 1930 alone.

According to the NKVD in 1940, 629 thousand 042 former “kulaks” fled from the settlement, of which 235 thousand 120 people were caught and returned.

Most of those listed as missing probably managed to escape and disappear into the vast expanses of the country, but many disappeared in the taiga.

The “crime” of Father Pavlik Morozov was, as is known, that, as the chairman of the village council in the Tobolsk region, in exchange for bribes he gave “forms with stamps” to the exiled kulaks, which gave them the opportunity to leave and try to start a new life.

To sum up the sad result, we can say that over three million people were subjected to repression, of whom about 500 thousand died.

Zigzags of the general line

While there was a struggle for power with Trotsky, Stalin criticized his theses about “super-industrialization” and “forced transfer of funds from the countryside to the city” and even received the nickname “peasant king” from his main opponent.

At the XIV Party Congress in December 1925, he called the slogan “Beat the fist!” erroneous. and spoke out against the “return of the Kombedov policy,” which, according to Stalin, led “to the proclamation of civil struggle in our country” and “to the disruption of all our construction work.”

New winds blew in 1928.

On February 15, Pravda suddenly published a large collection of materials about the “difficult situation in the countryside,” the “widespread dominance of the rich peasantry,” and the evil “kulak elements” who allegedly sneak into the positions of party cell secretaries and do not allow the poor and farm laborers into the party.

The revolution gave land to the peasants. Now they had to return the land and livestock to collective use and learn to say “our” instead of “mine.” Edward Radzinsky, historian

From that moment on, the propaganda campaign intensified. Every day, newspapers published letters from “indignant workers”: “The kulaks - these fierce enemies of socialism - have now become brutal. We must destroy them, issue a decree for their eviction, take away their property and equipment.”

The press raised the shield of a certain Red Army soldier Voronov, who, in response to his father’s letter: “They are taking away the last bread, the Red Army family is not taken into account,” replied: “Even though you are my dad, I didn’t believe a word of your sub-kulak songs. I’m glad that you were given a good lesson ".

On May 28, 1928, at a meeting with students of the Institute of Red Professors, Stalin publicly stated for the first time that there is a sure and reliable way to confiscate grain from the peasants: “this is a transition from individual peasant farming to a collective, social farming,” and at the July plenum of the Central Committee for the first time formulated the famous thesis about the intensification of the class struggle as we move towards socialism.

The right-wing opposition tried to stand up for the wealthy peasants. Nikolai Bukharin spoke about the possibility of “gradually growing the fist into socialism through cooperation” and urged “not to quarrel with the peasant.” Alexei Rykov stated that “the attack on the kulaks must be carried out, of course, not by the methods of so-called dispossession.”

At one of the plenums of the Central Committee, supporters of the moderate approach were able to pass a resolution: “Ensure assistance in further increasing the productivity of individual small and medium-sized peasant farms, which for a considerable time will still be the basis of grain farming in the country.”

Image caption Nikolai Bukharin advised not to go too far

However, in April 1929, Bukharin and Rykov were removed from the Politburo. “National condemnation” unfolded - even kindergarten teachers and cemetery gravediggers had to hold meetings.

On October 3, 1929, the Politburo issued a secret directive on “the use of decisive measures against the kulaks, including execution.”

On November 7, in a programmatic article “The Year of the Great Turning Point” published in Pravda, Stalin put forward the task of carrying out complete collectivization: “The last hope of the capitalists of all countries - the “sacred principle of private property” - is turning into dust.”

On November 13, a joint resolution of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR No. 40 was issued, “On preventing kulaks and disenfranchised people from participating in cooperation,” which prohibited “all cooperation, including membership in collective farms, for persons with kulak status.” An exception was made only for families where there are “red partisans, Red Army and Red Navy soldiers loyal to Soviet power, rural teachers and agronomists, provided that they vouch for their family members.”

Thus, even voluntary renunciation of property and agreement to join a collective farm could not save him from the upcoming repressions. People were condemned to exile not for what they had done, but for what they could hypothetically do.

On December 27, Stalin made a “historic” speech at a conference of Marxist agrarians, in which for the first time he publicly put forward the slogan of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”: “It is not only possible to dispossess the kulaks, but it is also necessary. Having taken off your head, you don’t cry over your hair.”

He called the question “ridiculous” whether it was possible to let a “kulak” into the collective farm: “Of course, it’s impossible, since he is a sworn enemy of the collective farm movement.”

On January 5, 1930, a decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued “On the pace of collectivization and measures of state assistance to collective farm construction,” which ordered the completion of collectivization in the main grain-growing regions by the fall of 1932.

We carried out collectivization well... I myself personally marked out the areas for the eviction of kulaks. Vyacheslav Molotov

On January 15, a Politburo commission was created to carry out collectivization, headed by Molotov. Stalin chose not to take formal responsibility.

The commission included 21 people, including the former regicide Isai Goloshchekin. 19 of them were soon repressed themselves. Only Molotov and Kalinin survived.

On January 30, the main document appeared, which became the basis for “dekulakization” and determined its parameters: the Politburo resolution “On measures to eliminate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization.”

Two days later, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Election Commission officially banned the use of hired labor and land rental in the village.

On February 2, the OGPU of the USSR issued order No. 44/21 on the “immediate liquidation of the counter-revolutionary kulak activists.” On February 4, a secret instruction of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee “On the eviction and resettlement of kulak farms” was issued, according to which “means of production, livestock, economic and residential buildings” were confiscated from the kulaks , manufacturing and trading enterprises, food, feed and seed stocks, surplus household property, as well as cash." You were allowed to take with you 500 rubles per family.

Image caption “The one who for all of us was one ruler of earthly destinies, whom the people called at celebrations their own father.” (Alexander Tvardovsky, “By Right of Memory”)

The terror continued after that. Only from August 7, 1932 to January 1, 1934, under the famous law “On strengthening criminal liability for theft and plunder of collective farm property,” better known as the “law of three ears of corn,” 125 thousand people were convicted, of which 5,400 were shot. Failure to comply with the norm of workdays on a collective farm could result in five years of exile. But now the peasants were repressed, so to speak, on a common basis with the rest of the population.

On May 24, 1934, the USSR Central Executive Committee allowed the former kulaks to be restored to civil rights “on an individual basis.”

During the war, about 100 thousand grown-up sons of kulaks were drafted into the army, and their families received freedom.

The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of November 26, 1948 confirmed that the remaining “special settlers” were exiled forever.

The final line was drawn by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of August 13, 1954 No. 1738-789ss “On the lifting of restrictions on special settlements for former kulaks.” There were about 130 thousand of them in places of exile at that time.

For what?

In the 1920s, the concept of “kulak” was clearly defined: a peasant who uses hired labor on the farm.

In each district there was a “troika” consisting of the first secretary of the district committee, the chairman of the district executive committee and the representative of the GPU, but in most cases the fate of people was decided by the “brigades” and “commissions” created in the villages.

How to get rid of lice? - Write “collective farm” on your head and they will all run away! Soviet joke

The first secretary of the Central Black Earth District Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and a member of the Molotov Commission, Joseph Vareikis, in response to the question asked during one of the meetings with activists, “how to understand a kulak,” said: “Discussions about how to understand a kulak are rotten, bureaucratic scholasticism , aimless, incomprehensible to anyone, and also very harmful."

To finally untie their hands, the authorities came up with the term “podkulaknik”. Anyone dissatisfied with collectivization could be included in this category, regardless of property status.

As archival documents show, families sometimes fell under dispossession for having two samovars, “going to church too often,” or “in September 1929 they slaughtered a pig in order to eat it and prevent it from becoming socialist property.”

Counter-revolutionary lament

Historian Roman Nikulin, in his book about dispossession in the Tambov region, quotes eyewitnesses: “They approached dispossession like this: the house is good, you let it be dispossessed. They take everything out, even to the point where they take off the children’s shoes and throw them out into the street. Screams of women, crying of children, squandering of property , lack of accounting - all this created a picture of a night robbery."

From the report of the OGPU department in the Smolensk region: “The dispossessors removed winter clothes and warm undershirts from wealthy peasants, taking away first of all shoes. The kulaks remained in long johns, even without old galoshes, they took away women’s clothing, fifty-kopeck tea, the last poker or jug. The brigades confiscated everything, including small pillows that are placed under children’s heads, hot porridge in a pot, right down to icons, which they, after breaking, threw away.”

Image caption More than six thousand migrants, left without food and shelter on the island of Nazino in the middle of the Ob, reached the point of cannibalism

From the report of the Kurgan department of the GPU: “Even copper icons are taken away - they will be useful for the tractor as waste materials. Soiled baby diapers are taken away.”

Some “kulaks” hastily filed for divorce in order to save their families, but most wives refused: “Even to the grave, together.” Crying was equated with anti-Soviet agitation.

About 250 thousand families managed to “dispossess themselves” - sell or distribute property to relatives and move to the city.

The main areas of settlement were Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Tomsk, Arkhangelsk regions, Krasnoyarsk Territory, the Urals and Kazakhstan.

In winter, the exiles were transported in freight cars of 40 people each. At junction stations, trains remained idle for weeks. People traveled tens or even hundreds of kilometers from the railway to their assigned places, sometimes on foot. Upon arrival, several hundred people were accommodated in barracks with three-tier bunks, and this was at best.

A report from Arkhangelsk admitted that by September 1930, instead of 1,641 barracks, only seven had been built. Often, pits covered with branches served as housing for exiles.

Tractor columns dig a grave for fists Sergei Kirov

In 1930, 3,306 people arrived in the special settlement "Bushuika" in the Aldan region, 1,415 of them were minors. During the first eight months, 184 children died.

From a memo from party worker Pyotr Yakovlev to Kalinin: “They sent them to terrible frosts - infants, pregnant women, who rode in calf cars on top of each other and immediately gave birth to their children ... then they were placed in dirty cold barns, in lice, hunger and cold ".

The writer Oleg Volkov described the fate of the “kulaks” exiled to Arkhangelsk: “These were crowds of not only dirty, lice-ridden and exhausted, but also fiercely hungry people. They did not smash the commandant’s office, did not drown mocking, well-fed clerks and accountants in the Dvina, did not go on a rampage and "They robbed. They obediently sat on logs and stones, not moving for hours. They did not always have time to remove the corpses during the night."

However, not everyone “sat obediently.” According to the GPU, in 1930, about 14 thousand protests took place in the countryside, in which up to 2.5 million people participated. True, five-sixths of them were “anti-Soviet conversations,” but there were also attacks on activists, arson, and damage to collective farm property.

The peak of resistance came in March, when security officers counted 6,528 protests, of which approximately 800 had to be suppressed by armed force. About one and a half thousand Soviet workers died.

Against our own

By shifting all responsibility to the “farmers,” Stalin was disingenuous. “Dekulakization” was planned and organized by the city communists, the main one of whom was himself. However, there was some truth in his words.

There were too few party workers, security officers and commissioners sent from the city to carry out a campaign of such magnitude.

Many peasants took part in the massacre - envious rags and drunks or ambitious young people, like the heroes of Philip Nasedkin’s story “The Great Hungry Men.”

The latter turned out to be, in the end, the only category of people who benefited as a result of collectivization.

Until 1985, power in the USSR belonged mainly to former rural Komsomol members of the early 1930s.

The aforementioned Vareikis noted with satisfaction: “Dekulakization is taking place with the active participation of the poor... The poor go in large groups with the commissions and take away livestock and property. At night, on their own initiative, they guard the roads in order to detain the fleeing kulaks.”

The personnel who went through the situation of 1932-1933 and withstood it were tempered like steel. I think that with them it is possible to build a State that history has never known before. From a letter from Ordzhonikidze to Kirov in January 1934

From a certificate from the Kurgan department of the GPU: “16 families were arrested, their property was stolen. The commissioner began to play the accordion, and the activists began to dance. Then they went to kulak houses, drank vodka, cooked pancakes. Children and women were stripped naked during the search... Kulak Osipov in the hut “They tortured the reading room, demanding to give up the gold... the secretary of the party cell tried to rape Pavlova from the kulak family.”

In the Borisoglebsk region, the secretary of the Komsomol cell sent his former lover, who had married another man, into exile, along with his happy rival and his parents.

It is characteristic that during dispossession it was not possible to confiscate any significant valuables to the state. Clothes, shoes, household utensils, gold and silver jewelry stuck to the hands of the “activists.”

With rare exceptions, no one was punished for all this.

The goal is total control

According to Soviet textbooks, the goal of collectivization was to increase agricultural production through the transition to large-scale machine farming.

In reality, there has been a catastrophic decline in the agricultural sector, especially in livestock farming. The number of cows from 1928 to 1934 decreased from 29 million to 19 million, horses - from 36 million to 14 million, pigs - by half, goats and sheep - three times. Even the war did not cause such damage.

“In the villages, men, hiding from each other, hastily and stupidly slaughtered their livestock. They did not salt for future use, not hoping to live on,” recalled Oleg Volkov.

People's Commissar of Agriculture Mikhail Chernov noted that in 1930, “for the first time in its entire difficult history, the Russian peasant at least ate his fill of meat.”

Image caption Collectivization was followed by famine

The satiety did not last long. In 1932-1933, the “Holodomor” broke out, the victims of which, according to official data provided by the Russian State Duma, were about 6 million people.

It was possible to stop the decline in the agricultural sector only in 1937, but it was not possible to return to the level of 1928 before the war. Stalin's successors, right up to the collapse of the USSR, massively purchased food abroad.

“Dekulakization” itself also turned out to be an unprofitable business. The average cost of property received by the treasury was on average 564 rubles per family, and the cost of deporting the same family was about a thousand rubles. In 1937, only about 350 thousand special settlers worked in the national economy, the rest were self-sufficient.

Nevertheless, there was logic in the actions of the Bolsheviks.

Firstly, they ideologically did not like independent owners who did not fit into their plans to transform the country into a single factory.

Marx wrote about “possessive swinishness” and “the idiocy of village life.” Lenin publicly promised to “lie with bones”, but not to allow free trade in grain, and called wealthy peasants “bloodsuckers”, “spiders”, “leeches” and “vampires”.

The founder of the Soviet state spoke equally emotionally only to the intelligentsia. Landowners, capitalists and royal dignitaries did not receive such abuse from his lips.

Secondly, the state, which launched accelerated industrialization, or rather, militarization of the economy, needed to receive bread to supply cities and the army at extremely low prices, or even for nothing.

Deliver a truly devastating punch with your fists! Stanislav Kosior, party leader of Ukraine

Stalin believed that peasants were obliged to forever pay the Soviet government for the land transferred to them by the landowners, without hesitating to use the medieval word “tribute.”

Shortly before his death, on October 16, 1952, he spoke at the plenum of the Central Committee: “The peasant is our debtor. We have assigned the land to the collective farms forever. They must repay their due debt to the state.”

In a speech at the first All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers on February 4, 1931, Stalin uttered the famous words: “We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or we will be crushed.”

It is unclear who threatened to “crush” the USSR in the early 30s, when the West was gripped by a severe crisis, France adhered to a purely defensive military doctrine, the USA and Britain did not maintain any significant armies at all, and Hitler was a political hooligan on a local scale, but the deadline Stalin determined the beginning of the great war to within a year.

According to statistics, there was bread in the country in the 20s, but “in the wrong hands.” It was possible to put an average of 350 million poods a year into state bins, with a need of 500 million.

Individual farmers wanted to sell their products on the free market, and if they were severely prevented, they reduced their acreage.

To stimulate the growth of agricultural production, it was necessary, firstly, to pay more, and secondly, to provide peasants with the opportunity to buy consumer goods with the proceeds. What is this - instead of tanks, the production of trousers and gramophones is launched?!

At the end of the 20s, the state tried to take grain without resorting to complete collectivization. “Terdosdatchikov”, that is, those who did not show high conscientiousness and refused to sell grain at state prices in excess of the tax in kind, were branded in the press and at meetings, deprived of voting rights, evicted from their homes in cold barns, forbidden to travel outside the village, and denied medical care , demanded that fellow villagers boycott them. But such measures did not help.

I always thought that I would die of old age, but when Russia started buying grain from the West, I almost died of laughter. Winston Churchill

In January 1928, during the next “grain procurement crisis,” Stalin, who generally did not like to travel around the country and communicate with ordinary people, went to Siberia. At one of the meetings with the workers, a certain man advised the then not yet god-like leader, but just the big Moscow boss, to dance - then he might sell two pounds.

Propaganda preparations for dispossession began about a month later.

A number of modern authors point out that Stalin’s collective farms became, in fact, the second edition of serfdom: peasants were attached to the land by the absence of passports, and for the right to feed themselves from their plots they had to serve corvee labor and pay rent in kind, not to the individual owner, but to the state.

According to most researchers, 1930 was fatal, because 1929 brought Stalin a final victory over the inner-party opposition and dictatorial power.

The 50th anniversary of the “leader” on December 21, 1929 was celebrated for the first time on a state scale and with unprecedented praise. Mikhail Kalinin spoke briefly and clearly: “Stalin is a genius who can do anything.”

Historian and economist Gavriil Popov sees another reason: the go-ahead for dispossession was given just over two months after the start of the Great Depression. Stalin unmistakably calculated that in times of crisis the West would turn a blind eye to any violations of human rights in the USSR and would willingly sell machine tools and entire factories for grain pumped out of the villages and timber felled by prisoners.

Rehabilitation without compensation

The Law of the Russian Federation “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression” of October 18, 1991 declared dispossession illegal.

Article 16.1 of the Law provides for the right of victims and their descendants to property compensation, but such cases are not described in the literature.