Pre-Revolution Various tsarist officials and their opposition had expressed negative views of
kulaks as early as the 19th century. Judge
Anatoly Koni compared
kulaks to profiteers, arguing that they are not tied to the land by labor or personal memories, but by exploiting its resources and people. These sentiments are echoed in the writings of people such as
Alexey Yermolov,
Alexander Engelhardt, and . In his 1899 work
Small public credit as a powerful means of combating the impoverishment of our peasants, governor of
Penza Ivan Koshko noted that the
kulaks had taken advantage of the inactivity of state-owned rural banks after the abolition of serfdom, forcing poorer peasants into private, predatory loans, thereby "[taking] over the entire peasant economy." He stated that as many as half of the 90 million peasant population were subjected to these exploitative relationships with
kulaks, and that the latter was able to at least roughly 500 million rubles annually. A few years later, after the turn of the century, Prime Minister
Pyotr Stolypin would argue that becoming a
kulak was the only way out of poverty for many, although at the expense of fellow peasants. The
Stolypin reform also aided in the development of the
kulak class by allowing peasants to acquire plots of land on credit from the
large estate owners. They were to repay the credit (a kind of mortgage loan) from their farm earnings. By 1912, 16% of peasants (up from 11% in 1903) had relatively large endowments of over per male family member (a threshold used in statistics to distinguish between middle-class and prosperous farmers, i.e. the
kulaks). At that time, an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children. The number of such farmers amounted to 20% of the rural population, producing almost 50% of marketable grain. The
Bolsheviks considered only
batraks and
bednyaks to be of a productive economic class;
serednyaks were considered unreliable, hesitating allies, and
kulaks were identified as
class enemies, with the term generally referring to "peasant producers who hired labourers or exploited their neighbours in some other way" according to historian
Robert W. Davies. Conquest argues that the definition of a
kulak was later expanded to include those peasants who owned livestock; however, a middle peasant who did not hire laborers and was little engaged in trade "might yet (if he had a large family) hold three cows and two horses." Conquest wrote: "The land of the landlords had been spontaneously seized by the peasantry in 1917–18. A small class of richer peasants with around had then been expropriated by the Bolsheviks. Thereafter a Marxist conception of
class struggle led to an almost totally imaginary class categorization being inflicted in the villages, where peasants with a couple of cows or more than their neighbors were now being labeled '
kulaks,' and a class war against them was being declared."
1920s–1930s The average value of the goods which were confiscated from the
kulaks during the policy of
dekulakization () at the beginning of the 1930s was only 170–400 rubles (US$90–210) per household. During the height of
Collectivization in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, people who were identified as
kulaks were subjected to deportation and
extrajudicial punishments. They were frequently murdered in local campaigns of violence, while others were formally executed after they were convicted of being
kulaks. In May 1929, the
Sovnarkom issued a decree which formalised the notion of '
kulak household' (), according to which any of the following criteria defined a person as a
kulak: • Use of permanent hired labor. • Ownership of a
mill, a
creamery (, 'butter-making rig'), other processing equipment, or a complex machine with a motor. • Systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities. • Involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labor income." In 1930, this list was expanded so it could include people who were renting industrial plants, e.g.
sawmills, or people who rented land to other farmers. At the same time, the
ispolkoms (executive committees of local Soviets) of republics,
oblasts, and
krais were granted the right to add other criteria to the list so other people could be classified as
kulaks, depending on local conditions. Also in 1930, the Ukrainian film
Earth by
Alexander Dovzhenko was released, concerning a community of farmers and their resistance to collectivization.
Earth depicts the social struggles between
kulaks and a youth who introduces a tractor to a Ukrainian village. In 1932 and 1933, the label "kulak" was extended to include anyone who offered passive or active resistance to grain procurements ("
kulak sabotage") in addition to landowners and those employing hired labor, as well as the so-called "hard‐deliverers" (peasants subject to fixed grain‐delivery quotas) and "experts" (those recruited to oversee or report on procurement). == Dekulakization ==