Free Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark

Many thousands of peasants died in these pitched battles, as did loyal Stalinists and OGPU members. In 1930 the Soviet regime passed 20,201 death sentences in the villages for political crimes, ten times more than in 1929. Most were associated with quelling rebellions in the countryside and enforcing compliance with collectivization programs.10
    There were several characteristics of the dekulakization campaigns that should lead us to think about their genocidal qualities. First, Stalin ordered the attack on the countryside and entrusted its realization to his immediate deputies, including Genrikh Yagoda, head of the OGPU. Stalin oversaw the operations, eagerly read reports of their successes and problems, and made it clear from the beginning that no resistance was to be tolerated and that the kulaks were “to be eliminated as a class”: killed, displaced, deported, and scattered in special settlements throughout the Far North, Central Asia, and Siberia.
    Second, kulaks were defined in terms of families, not as individuals. Thus not only the head of the household and his wife were considered kulaks, but all of their relatives, young and old. The peasants who were labeled kulaks were deported as families and, indeed, sometimes even shot as families. Children of kulaks carried the mark of Cain dekulakization 59
    throughout their lives, whatever their eventual jobs or professions. Kulakdom—if you will—was hereditary. This was, wrote Solzhenitsyn, “the nub of the plan: the peasants’ seed must perish together with the adults.”11
    Third, kulaks were subjected to the kind of dehumanization and stereotyping that was common for victims of genocide throughout the twentieth century. They were
    “enemies of the people,” to be sure, but also “swine,”
    “dogs,” and “cockroaches”; they were “scum,” “vermin,”
    “filth,” and “garbage,” to be cleansed, crushed, and eliminated. Gorky described them as “half animals,” while Soviet press and propaganda materials sometimes depicted them as apes.12 Kulaks in this sense were dehumanized and racialized into beings inherently inferior to others—
    and they were treated as such.
    Fourth, kulaks were eliminated in large numbers. In the process of collectivization, some thirty thousand kulaks were killed, most condemned to death by quickly appointed judicial troikas and shot on the spot. The lucky ones were beaten, abused, arrested, and then sent into exile, their homes burned to the ground. Large numbers of kulaks—estimates range around the two million mark—
    were forcibly deported to the Far North and Siberia. Most of these were sent to so-called special settlements, which were scattered over the harsh landscape and in theory provisioned by the OGPU to hold the huge number of deportees.
    The special settlements were an important dimension of the Archipelago Gulag, so poignantly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. However, Solzhenitsyn had little in-60
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    formation about the special settlements, which swallowed up countless Soviet citizens in the 1930s and could be as lethal for their inhabitants as the better-known labor camps such as Vorkuta, Kolyma, and other similarly forbidding and fearsome imitations of hell. On paper, writes Lynne Viola, the special settlements were “a penal Utopia for isolating and reforging social enemies.” In fact, they
    “became little more than a shoddily constructed institution of forced labor.”13
    In January 1932 the OGPU estimated that close to 500,000 kulaks, roughly 30 percent of the total number of kulak deportees at that time, had already died in the camps or had run away.14 Leaving the deadly labor camps of the Gulag penal system aside, there is a real problem in thinking about the issue of genocide when it comes to the special settlements. Ostensibly, these settlements were designed to remove the kulaks from society—and later national groups and so-called asocials (“socially harmful