Talk:Kulak

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2019 and 24 February 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cjacobites (article contribs).

POV

When the article says they were "encouraged to form collective farms" instead of "collectivised at the point of a gun" then this article loses all credibility. How much more blatant can the pro-communism POV get? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.53.244.132 (talk) 19:31, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you not consider being threatened with a gun very encouraging of actions the armed men will interpret as obedience? I suspect your comment comes from the mindset the Pentagon "encouraged" among US taxpayers whom they needed to convince should freely underwrite their plan to expand the military in the post-WW2 era. Hence the very common, albeit completely absurd notion among Americans that this was essential given how Soviet politicians and generals thought of little else than some way of attacking and killing American simply because "they hate our freedoms" Mycos 05:15, 11 June 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mycos (talk • contribs)

They undermined the collectivization process by destroying their food, livestock, tools and materials which would have gone to feed Ukraine but instead they were the primary cause for the famine.--69.228.144.226 (talk) 00:31, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Please don't troll in article talk pages. Thanks. —Michael Z. 2008-12-28 04:13 z

Kulaks before the October Revolution

One thing I find disappointing in this article is the lack of information about how the word kulak was used before the Bolsheviks adopted it. This posting on rootsweb suggests that it was understood to be a perjorative term, meaning "village usurer". If so, I would not expect anyone to have used the term to describe himself, and Stolypin wouldn't have used it in promoting his policies. The article suggests otherwise, though.

Is there a source which mentions how the term was used before it denoted a class enemy? Aoeuidhtns (talk) 04:27, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree, this article should include Kulak's prior to Bolsheviks, and give more comparison of the economic status of the 3 peasant classes, before the Dekulakization. Although, it might seem bias for those would sympthaize with the Kulak's it also give a better understanding of why bednyak and serednyak were so willing to outcast their fellow countrymen.Carr63 (talk) 22:14, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Kulaks and strips of land post serfdom

Hello, I was reading this article about Kulaks on a biased, unreliable source: Encyclopedia of Marxism. Almost the whole gist of the article is that kulaks were the people who owned these long strips of land in between peasant lands after serfdom. There are no citations for this; probably it is false.

But is this what was taught in soviet textbooks etc for half a century? When a reader goes to the Kulak article on Wikipedia, they may not just be trying to find out about what Kulaks actually were (and weren't) but what the popular soviet/marxist conception of them was. If this definition about the strips of land was ever widespread in Soviet sources/culture it might be worth noting in the wikipedia article. Someone more familiar with the topic and reliable sources might know. 132.74.210.40 (talk) 15:16, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Ukrainian kurkul' rather than kurkul

Xx236 (talk) 06:49, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

typo?

Looks to me like 'rural court' should be 'rural count', ie, the total rural population in the following sentence:

"The number of such farmers amounted to 20% of all rural courts, while their production level was reaching 50% of marketable grain.[7]"

Reference 7 is in Russian, or perhaps Ukrainian, and so not any help, at least to me, in figuring out what they meant. I would change the sentence to read:

"The number of such farmers amounted to only 20% of all of farmers, while their production level was reaching 50% of marketable grain.[7]

DlronW (talk) 17:51, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Capitalistic article on kulaks

There's no neutral point of view here.

I understand that people formed under capitalism are unable to realize their bias, so they should give themselves at least a little of marxist formation (at the minimum, read Das Kapital) to gain some capacity to analize the things beyond the little box of capitalism, exploitation, market logic, etc.

I don't have time right now to explain this on detail, so I'll point out just a couple of examples:

There's no indication about how the kulaks made their property.

The same about how they made their incomes, under which conditions they exploit the working force of poor peasants.

There's no frame to understand (or will to explain) which were the goals of the revolution, the socialization of the land and production means.

There's no recount about the level of poberty of the peasant masses, and the general economic condition (it's obvious that 4 horses, or 2 cows and a piece of land, when everybody is dying of hunger, is a lot of capital, and implies a lot of exploitation).

There's a lot of this things like this in the article, but I supose this should be enough to make someone start to think outside capitalist box...

190.30.166.161 (talk) 05:36, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Specifically, the issue with the article in its current state is that Robert Conquest is frequently cited as a source of factual or definitional passages, with no mention that the definitions and assertions represented in those passages are in fact contested by other historians, and the article also fails to mention any perspectives besides strongly anti-Stalin/anti-Soviet ones. This doesn't mean that we should make this into a propaganda piece in the other direction, or even that the opposing viewpoints need to be given equal weight (at least, not if they aren't of similar levels of notability and number), but simply that in the interest of presenting all points of view neutrally, mention needs to be made of other historical views supported by notable sources. goose121 (talk) 16:47, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Great Read

I thought that all of the talking points were thorough and well written. I was able to get a more in depth view of the specific sub-sections that the Kulaks embodied. What I find most interesting about this article is the short section that has been dedicated to those executed as a result of bucking the system, or fighting back. Though many people simply, "disappeared"; the number of death was estimated anywhere from 700,000 persons, to 6 million people. Those numbers, though high, are significantly different. It would be great to find a more exact and finite estimate to the number of people that were killed as a result of forced collectivization. LoAnsons18 (talk) 02:20, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Reverted edit by Wikiamoo (talk)

I reverted this edit because "liquidated" has a specific meaning in both this particular context as well as in Marxism. "Liquidated" is not a synonym for "killed", as most direct references to this phrase by Marxist writers and leaders is followed by "as a class". While violence is often a means for "liquidation", it may also refer to changing relations of production by means of re-appropriation of land ownership.

If anyone has an issue with my edit, please take a look at the Liquidation (disambiguation) page. déhanchements (talk) 00:43, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

"Liquidate"

Why is this word used here? It is the euphemism of Stalin’s preference, the term used should be more direct, e.g. “killed”, “murdered”, etc. déhanchements (talk) 18:59, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

The answer to this borderline rhetorical question has been answered several times in several place. First in another section of this talk page, then in the wildly inappropriate choice of my user talk page. Furthermore, Wikipedia articles themselves are not appropriate sources as per WP:RSPRIMARY and WP:TERTIARY. Therefore, simply referring to the disambiguation page for "liquidation" is not enough, although by doing so, you have pointed out two important points: first, that that page has issues, and second that there in fact exists a specific usage of the term "liquidation" used in Marxist theory that is not synonymous with "murder" (although again, relying only on this fact is another WP:TERTIARY issue; this page is, in turn, also lacking).

That said, I can concede that your rephrasing of the sentence

Stalin ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class" and this destruction of the Kulak class was considered by many historians to have resulted in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

is in fact in place. This is because the sentence is now referring explicitly to the position of a specific historian.

I therefore suggest that the sentence read:

Stalin ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class" and some historians claim that this was the cause of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

Alternatively:

Stalin ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class" and some historians claim that this liquidation order was the cause of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

See also the page on the Holodomor genocide question. While I obviously don't endorse using this as a source, the page includes several citations that may be of use in assessing the bias of this article. Given the diversity of claims and positions on the matter, it's certainly necessary to specify that the synonymous usage of "liquidation" and "genocide" is highly contested among historians. AndersLeo (talk) 10:17, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

According to the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, writing in 1909, liquidationism "consists ideologically in negation of the revolutionary class struggle of the socialist proletariat in general, and denial of the hegemony of the proletariat". What does this have to do with the act of "liquidating" a class? This article seems to be describing an entirely different concept. And liquidating as it is used in this article (Kulak) would be the liquidation of liquidation. déhanchements (talk) 20:47, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

This is precisely what I mean when I say that the page is lacking; the definition is non-exhaustive. Liquidation as the term is used by Lenin in the context of the article on Liquidationism refers specifically to Left and Right Liquidationism, in which the proletariat is the class being liquidated. The general definition can easily be seen from the quote you've provided, i.e. the negation of class ideology and the denial of class hegemony. From a purely objective standpoint, the entire point of dekulakization was to ideologically negate the feudal class relations that existed in rural Russia before the revolution and to deny the pre-existing class hegemony that persisted to some degree in some regions. This is explicitly what was stated at the onset of the order. There is no other obvious motive. That is not to say that other possibilities do not exist; they must, however, be backed by actual sources. Suffice to say that to my knowledge, the only "evidence" to the contrary originates in literal Nazi propaganda, but you are welcome and encouraged to contribute to Wikipedia in a constructive manner if you happen to have any legitimate sources to corroborate this. In general and in principle and most importantly, in practice, this liquidation accomplished in many ways, including but not limited to violent revolutionary struggle. Whether you believe that people overthrowing feudal lords--by any means--is moral, ethical, or whatever is completely irrelevant to the discussion and does not belong on Wikipedia.

What is, however, a matter of contention, is the degree to which violent means were primary, or if liquidation in fact constitutes a genocide. While many have argued that it is, the internationally recognized consensus is that it does not, since international law maintains that "genocide" is limited to the deliberate killing of an ethnic group or nation, and kulaks, a class, and not Ukrainians, a national/ethnic group, were subject to this order. Luckily not every Wikipedia article need contain the regurgitation of Nazi-inspired propaganda from fringe anti-communist academics as it is neatly contained in the appropriate article that exists for this express purpose.

Beyond this, I'm not sure what else you feel is lacking. AndersLeo (talk) 15:01, 2 December 2019 (UTC)