Something that hasn't been discussed in relation to this issue is the arbitrariness of the Stalinist definition of "kulak." Often it meant anyone who had a little more than other also desperately poor people, but enough the excite envy, and who also lacked social skills or connections or were recent immigrants to the area (i.s., whose families hadn't been in the neighborhood for 300 years). The implication of the term was (to transpose it to a US Southern, or anyway Faulknerian frame of reference), the kulaks were "Snopeses" -- the Snopes being the cold blooded rural capitalists on the make who are are importinbg the cold cas nexus into the merely rural perversions of Faulkner's imaginary Yokhnatapapha (sp?) County, these are the anti-heroes of The Hamlet, The Mansion, and I forget the other one. Generally nasty sonbsabitches, not really rich, but rich enough not to care about anyone else, and to exploit therm. Mind you Faulkner's not sentimental bout the genuinely poor, like the Bundrens of As I Lay -- his whole South is cursed and haunted by slavery and the shadow of race, and poverty, in his view, degrades rather than ennobes. As does wealth.
This isa digression. but nota wholly irrelevant one. The campaign against the kulaks as a class was only incidentally an assault on the NEP and incipient capitalism, it was primarily an attempt to atomize rural society by turning everyone against everyone else. People who reasonably concealed some of their produce from expropriation on the plausible guess that the state would not take of them, as it did not in the terrible famine in the Ukraine where 8 million +/- perished, almsot certainly fay more bya n order of manigitude than those who were murdered in the Terror and the Purges -- anyway, they were treated as "kulaks," informed on, dispossessed, exiled, or murdered outright. It was only in such conditions of social disintegration that more extreme mesaures, such as collectivization and mass requisition by force and ensuring famine could be enforced without mass resistance.
Conquest has a good book on the famine, Harvest of Sorrow. Carr and Davies discuss the economics of the anti-Kulak campaign and the collectivization drives.
A catastrophe foe Soviet Russia: collectives might have been effectively set up by nationalizing the landing and imposing restrictions on sale (land speculation), while allowing the peasants to keep the fruit of the labors after taxes. And of course avoiding mass requisitions, incentives to inform, arrest and murder without trial, deporatations, and famine.
But those were intentional, not accidental byproducts of the collectivaztion drive. The collectivization campaign (including the liquidation of the kulaks asa class) was the second worst thing, in terms of sheer body count, that Stalin did. Thew orst was fucking up the defense of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, increasing Soviet casualties immeasurable. 20 to 50 million died in that war; with proper preparations and sensible defenses, it might have been a tenth that. The Purges, even the Yezhovshchina of 1937, fade into inconsequentiality in comparison -- criminal as they were.
Charles will say that this is mere anti-Sovietism. I say that it is essential to a proper appraisal of the Stalinist system, which is no longer really an object to be defended, but merely assessed. I don't dismiss the positive aspects of the Soviet experience. But apart from insisting on the negative lessons of total planning, I see no point in apologizing for the intentional evils and cruelty of the Stalinist dictatorship. Note that I reject the high body counts of the likes of Conquest and Solzhentisn -- I go with Getty's and Davies' much lower figures. But the lowest of those figures give us 8 million dead in the planned famine in the Ukraine.
jks
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- RE <earnest at tallynet.com> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Some years ago a friend cited this article when I
> > asked about kulaks, and I
> > wonder if it's still considered adequate to the
> > question.
> s
> Well I am about 10,000,000 versts from being an
> expert
> on the subject, but I do have a couple of comments
> that may or may not be relevant.
>
>
> >
> > "Yet, in spite of the seemingly self-evident truth
> > of the suppositions
> > discussed above, and the important empirical
> support
> > provided for it by the
> > evidence of the Budget Studies and Rural Censuses,
> > the story of polarization
> > as the main socio-economic process among the
> Russian
> > peasantry is not true,
> > or, more precisely, is not the whole truth.
>
> The version of history I am familiar with says that
> the peasantry as a class was becomign increasingly
> destitute from aroung the time of the abolition of
> serfdom on (please correct me anyone if I am wrong
> --
> I am not on my territory, and my facts are mainly
> taken from Figes). The size of a peasant farm was
> determined by the size of the family. Obviously,
> this
> led to huge families, and the peasant population
> grew
> from 50 million to 79 million (!) from 1861-1897,
> despite movement to the cities. (I seem to remember
> from what's his name's book Planning the Socialist
> Metropolis that the population of Moscow increased
> something like 50% in the latter decade or two of
> the
> 1800s due largely to immigration from the country.)
> As
> a result, available arable land started to run out
> and
> farms got progressively smaller, and soil became
> exhausted by being overworked, resulting in even
> less
> arable land, and herds could not be supported. By
> the
> end of the century, one-third of peasant households
> did not even own a horse. Some people moved to
> Siberia, where colonists could get land. Some moved
> to
> the cities (as mentioned). Others supported
> themselves
> by supplementing their income from produce (if there
> was any left over beyond feeding the family) by
> logging, weaving, carpentry or so forth, but they
> were
> increasingly unable to compete with the growing
> urban
> working class. (According to Figes, BTW, it was the
> newly urbanized peasants, with their hatred of rural
> life, that formed the back of support for
> Bolshevism.)
> >
> > Finally, the October revolution marked an attempt
> by
> > the new government to
> > 'put the wager' on the rural proletariat, to
> > activate and unify the rural
> > poor as the natural allies of the urban
> proletarian
> > revolution.
>
> I don't get this -- who is the "rural proletariat"?
> Peasants aren't proletarians.
>
> The country folk supported the SRs and the
> anarchists,
> not the Bolsheviks, AFAIK.
>
> Yet
> > within less than a year this policy had to be
> > abandoned and the 'Committees
> > of the Poor' which had been set up disbanded. This
> > step is described by a
> > leading historian of the period as 'timely
> > recognition of failure-a retreat
> > from untenable pcsitions'.~imilar results occurred
> > with the so-called policy
> > of 'directed agriculture' in 1920.~~ The attempts
> of
> > the Soviet government
> > to split the peasantry and establish a Bolshevik
> > foothold among the rural
> > poor failed.
>
> Well, the economic interests of the peasantry, who
> are
> property-holders by definition, did not lie in
> socialisation of the means of the production. They
> lay
> in land reallocation (and here you do get a
> difference
> in interest between poorer and richer peasants,
> because, unless you're not talking about landed
> estates owned by the aristocracy, since the land for
> the poorer peasants would have to come from the
> richer. Actually, I believe that the de-kulakization
> was originally supported by the poorer peasants
> because they believed the land would be given to
> them,
> not become collective farms.)
>
> The New Economic Policy at the end of
> > 1920 amounted to a
> > government surrender to the pressure of peasant
> > will, and an explicit
> > recognition of the Russian peasantry as a
> cohesive,
> > specific and powerful
> > social class...."
> >
>
> That sounds right. How are peasants going to survive
> que peasants without trade? They live by selling
> their
> goods in the city, once they move past the
> subsistence
> farming level.
>
> =====
> Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> All your favorites on one personal page – Try My
> Yahoo!
> http://my.yahoo.com
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail