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The war against the kulak
This frenetic race towards collectivization was accompanied by a `dekulakization' movement: kulaks were expropriated, sometimes exiled. What was happening was a new step in the fierce battle between poor peasants and rich peasants. For centuries, the poor had been systematically beaten and crushed when, out of sheer desperation, they dared revolt and rebel. But this time, for the first time, the legal force of the State was on their side. A student working in a kolkhoz in 1930 told the U.S. citizen Hindus:
`This was war, and is war. The koolak had to be got out of the way as completely as an enemy at the front. He is the enemy at the front. He is the enemy of the kolkhoz.'
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Ibid. , p. 173.
Preobrazhensky, who had upheld Trotsky to the hilt, now enthusiastically supported the battle for collectivization:
`The working masses in the countryside have been exploited for centuries. Now, after a chain of bloody defeats beginning with the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, their powerful movement for the first time in human history has a chance of victory.'
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Ibid. , p. 274.
It should be said that the radicalism in the countryside was also stimulated by the general mobilization and agitation in the country undergoing industrialization.
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995