DEKULAKIZATION: On this day in 1929, Joseph Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”

Who were the kulaks? They were “rich peasants” (a bit of a contradiction in terms). Kulaks were peasants who had a little more land than their neighbors … or maybe a couple more cows … or maybe they just weren’t as keen on collectivization as their neighbors.

Soviet leaders called them bloodsuckers and hyenas. (Here in America we might have called them yeoman farmers.)

Dekulakization meant that they would be killed or their property would be seized and they would be sent to prisons or labor camps in Siberia or elsewhere. Some were resettled on inferior land.  Robert Conquest, who was pretty meticulous about these things, wrote that as many as five million may have died between 1929 and 1933.