Citations:kulak


 * 1877, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, New York: Henry Holt, p 105:
 * Not a few industrial villages have thus fallen under the power of the Kulaki—literally Fists—as these monopolists are called. By advancing money the Kulák may succeed in acquiring over a group of villages a power almost as unlimited as that of the proprietor in the time of serfage.
 * 1885, US Department of State, Consular Reports on Commerce, Manufactures, etc., v 16, Washington: Government Printing Office, p 178:
 * Every middleman—“koulak”—has his own district, consisting of several villages, and knows not only every individual, but is accurately posted as to their circumstances, necessities, and dispositions. [. . .] He pays low prices, but makes sales of purchases as easy as possible for his customers, and soon has the peasants entirely in his power. Their efforts to place their crops in the market without the intervention of the “koulak” always result disastrously, so that they accept the latter's services as the latter of two evils.
 * 1895, “New Books”, in Scottish Geographical Magazine, v 11, n 4, Royal Scottish Geographical Society, p 207:
 * When the Jews were driven from these great commercial centres the rate of interest on loans rose from 25% to 200%; for everywhere they are ready to lend at a lower rate than the Russian Kulaks, or small money-lenders.
 * 1905, Victor Bérard, transl. G. Fox Davies and G. O. Pope, The Russian Empire and Czarism, London: David Nutt, p 173:
 * These Orthodox monopolists have earned a melancholy celebrity for their surname of koulak. In the provinces of the chernoziom the koulak is a sort of bandit under the protection of the law, but who is nevertheless obliged to defend both himself and his storehouses by stout walls and armed guards from the fury of the peasant.
 * 1925, Pelham Horton Box, “Nikolai Lenin” in Three Master Builders and Another: Studies in Modern Revolutionary and Liberal Statesmanship, Ayer, p 88:
 * The only result of this measure was the coalition of the “middle” or independent peasants with the “Kulaks” or wealthy peasants who employed labour, against their inveterate enemies, the lazy and shiftless.
 * 1930, Walter Duranty, New York Times, January 26, p 51:
 * [headline] Soviets Ruthless in War on Kulaks; Stalin Explains “Liquidation” of Rich Peasants Means Complete Dispossession.
 * 1948, Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, Harper, p 129:
 * They had to do what the Belial in them dictated — and the Belial in them wanted the Communist Revolution, wanted the Fascist reaction to that revolution, wanted Mussolini and Hitler and the Politburo, wanted famine, inflation and depression; wanted armaments as a cure for unemployment; wanted the persecution of the Jews and the Kulaks; wanted the Nazis and the Communists to divide Poland and then go to war with one another.
 * 1969, Steve Durasoff, The Russian Protestants: evangelicals in the Soviet Union, 1944-1964, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, p 88:
 * In Lenin's The Agrarian Question (1908) he made his analysis of the peasantry by dividing them into three classes: the kulak or rich peasant; the sredniak or middle peasant, who farmed his own land in a small way; and the bedniak or poor peasant, who owned nothing.
 * 1971, Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, p 275–76:
 * The official villain in the concentrated attack was the kulak, though precisely who he was no one knew for sure. Before the revolution, the kulak had been a fairly well-defined category in the social structure of the countryside. He was the peasant whose energy, shrewdness, and lack of scruples combined to lodge economic power in his hands. He was a money lender, perhaps owned a mill where he exacted ungodly toll from his neighbors, leased other people's land on one-sided terms. Through hard work, usury, and exploitation he often gathered the lives of the less capable peasants in his fist — the word kulak means “fist.”
 * After the revolution, the opprobrious label of kulak was stretched to cover any peasant who employed labor or who owned a little more property than the rest. By 1929, it was converted into a generic term of abuse, with only a tenuous reference to economic possessions. Whoever failed conspicuously to fall into line with the Soviet policies was thereby marked as a kulak. If his poverty was such as to make the title preposterous he was called a “kulak agent” and treated as one anyhow.
 * 1986, Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, p 120:
 * Thus, by a strange logic, a middle peasant could become a kulak by gaining property, but a kulak could not become a middle peasant by losing his. In fact the kulak had no escape. He was ‘essentially’ a class enemy, a sub-human. Yet the naming of the kulak enemy satisfied the Marxist preconceptions of the Party activist. [. . . §] The Party's plan for the kulak was formalised in the resolution of 30 January, based on the report of Bauman's sub-commission, which gave the three categories of kulak, and laid down the imprisonment or execution of the first group, to number no more than 63,000.
 * 1996, Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p 557:
 * In Soviet Ukraine as elsewhere in the Soviet Union (especially the rich agricultural regions of the Don, lower Volga, and the Kuban River valleys, north of the Caucasus), the relatively well-to-do peasants who had expanded their landholding after the reforms of 1906 were called kulaks (kurkuli). Because they were opposed to collectivization, they were branded by the Bolshevkis ‘enemies of the people’ and presented throughout the 1920s in Soviet propaganda as wealthy land-grabbing exploiters of their fellow villagers. In lieu of such inflammatory but vague rhetoric, the Soviets attempted to provide a concrete definition of who qualified as a kulak. [. . .] In short, the term kulak and the even vaguer category of kulak henchmen (pidkurkul’nyky) had less to do with actual wealth than with the need of the Soviet authorities to have an all-purpose term with which to brand whomever they considered their enemy in the countryside.
 * 2007, Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation, Oxford University Press, p 108:
 * In the language typical of the time, the Stalinists presented the campaign for the all-out socialization of the countryside as a class war, a crusade against the rich peasants or kulaks. Because the term “kulak” (kurkul in Ukrainian) had never been clearly defined, anyone resisting collectivization could be branded one. The press proclaimed that kulaks were wealthy peasants who exploited hired labor, but in reality, many of those whe were hiring help were disabled war veterans, widows, and families with a number of small children.