Forced Labor in The Soviet Union - Kulak

Kulak

The kulak were known as the upper class peasantry. They were landowners and they took full advantage of capitalism in pre Soviet-Union Russia but the development of the complete collectivization of agriculture served as the basis for the shift to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class. The first major wave to the GULAG was engineered in the early 1930’s to liquidate the Kulak during the great purge. Dekulakization had two powerful drives, it was a threat to agricultural regions in order to maintain collectivisation and it gave regions with labor shortages access to a large labor supply. According to data in the Soviet archives, 1,803,392 Kulak were sent to labor colonies and camps from 1930 to 1931.