WHY DID THE BOLSHEVIKS HATE THE KULAKS SO MUCH?

by Empires & Revolution

In the early history of the Soviet Union the most hated group was not whom you would expect it to be, namely the clergy, the capitalists, or the aristocracy. In fact, the most despised group -- and the one that bore the biggest cost in terms of blood and suffering -- was what the Communists termed "kulaks."

Essentially kulaks were just the upper tier of Russia's hard-working peasantry. Yes, the Communist class war was mainly directed at the smarter, better, more efficient members of Russia's rural working class -- a group of people that a Left-wing party, as the Bolsheviks supposedly were, should at least have been partly in favour of. 

But, instead, here is Lenin in typical spittle-flecked mode, laying out the Bolshevik attitude to the kulaks:

There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarrelled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never.

[Lenin, “Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!” August 1918, in Lenin, V.I. Collected Works. Vol. 28. Moscow: 1965., pp. 53-57.]

But did Lenin have a point? Were the kulaks really such bloodthirsty foes of the working class, of which they were, of course, also a part?

Of course not. Lenin, like most Communists, was a large-scale liar. But why then the desperate attempt to demonise what was probably the hardest working part of the rural working class? 

In the same speech/article, "Comrade Workers, Forward to the Last Decisive Fight," Lenin gives his reasons: 

"...the kulaks succeeded in turning back from a republic to a monarchy, from a working people’s government to the despotism of the exploiters, the rich and the parasites. This happened before our very eyes in Latvia, Finland, the Ukraine and Georgia. Everywhere the avaricious, bloated and bestial kulaks joined hands with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and against the poor generally. Everywhere the kulaks wreaked their vengeance on the working class with incredible ferocity…"

Yes, the kulaks apparently played a key role in counter-revolution, helping the forces of conservatism, tradition, and nationalism gain victory, and preventing the Communists from gaining control of key areas. In effect, Lenin's hatred of kulaks grew directly out of how much they prevented him gaining complete power.

But there is more to it than that. 

The kulaks were a large class of people, certainly tens of millions strong, before their numbers were eradicated by starvation, execution, and dispossession. Not all of them were right-wingers or sympathetic to the old order. Among this large swathe of society there were also many Left-wingers who despised the capitalists and the landowners just as much, if not more than Lenin and his Bolsheviks. 

My guess is that a plurality, if not a majority, of  kulaks  were Left-wingers, keen to get their hands on the lands of the rich. But their problem was that they tended to support rival Left-wing parties to the Bolsheviks, like the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Lenin and Stalin's war against them was therefore a battle against rival leftists. 

In Comrade Workers Lenin makes this explicit:

"Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them -- the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today’s Left Socialist-Revolutionaries!"

It is almost impossible to imagine a more power-mad, hate-filled person than Lenin in 1918, finally grabbing his big chance to gain supreme power over the corpses of millions of useful citizens.