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kulak
An epithet, derived from the Russian word for
“fist,” that assumed an important role in the
Russian and political vocabulary of the first
three decades of the 20th century. The initial
application of the term, in prerevolutionary
1917, referred to those peasants who chose to
break away from the village commune under
the provisions of the land reform inaugurated
by Prime Minister Peter
STOLYPIN
in 1906.
Known as the “wager on the strong,” Stolypin
sought to create a class of landowning peasants
that would be less vulnerable to revolutionary
propaganda by virtue of having a stake in land
ownership. In many villages, kulaks became
prominent figures, owning their homes and
livestock and often hiring other peasants to
work their fields. There was also an element of
resentment against kulaks that would reemerge
in postrevolutionary political discourse. Response
to the reforms was not overwhelming—by 1916
only 10 percent of peasants had taken advan-
tage of the opportunity—but a full assessment
of the appeal of this program is not possible
because of the role of World War I and the Rus-
sian revolutions of 1917, followed by a different
landholding structure inaugurated by the Soviet
government.
After the 1917 Revolutions the term
kulak
found its way into Communist propaganda to
refer to the comparatively prosperous peasants
whom the Soviet government disenfranchised
and subjected to heavier taxation. Under the
New Economic Policy, wealthier peasants briefly
received preferential treatment. In the difficult
decades after the revolution, however, notions
of wealth among the peasants were purely rela-
tive; in some cases commentators made the wry
observation that a kulak had two cows where a
regular peasant had only one. The onset of col-
lectivization in 1929 added another dimension
to the term, which was now used quite broadly
by the government and its propaganda machin-
ery to designate any peasant who opposed col-
lectivization. As the struggle over collectivization
intensified, the government announced a policy
of “dekulakization,” or “liquidating the kulaks as
a class.” In human terms, this meant the disap-
pearance of more than 5 million peasant house-
holds; their members were either killed or
deported to labor camps or to remote areas as
“special settlers.” The losses to Soviet agriculture
caused by the collectivization campaign and
dekulakization were immense, and their impact
was felt for decades to come.
Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich
(1899-1970)
film director
One of the great pioneers of early Soviet cinema,
Kuleshov was born in Tambov, and started in the
film industry as a stage designer in 1916. As the
first documentary filmmaker during the Russian
civil war, he developed many of the techniques
of editing and special effects that would help
Soviet propaganda films attain an overall high
artistic quality in the 1920s. His first film,
Na
krasnom fronte
(On the Red Front), was one of
the first agit-films screened around the country
on the agitational trains developed by the
BOL
-
SHEVIKS
. In 1919 he founded the State Film
School, where he taught until 1930. Some of the
more prominent names of Soviet cinema in the
1920s, including Vsevolod
PUDOVKIN
, Boris Bar-
net, S. Komarov, and his future wife, Aleksandra
Khokhlova, were graduates of his influential
workshop. His better-known films include the
classic
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in
the Land of the Bolsheviks
(1924) and an adapta-
tion of Jack London's
By the Law
(1926). In the
1930s, Kuleshov was attacked for “formalist”
tendencies in his work, particularly his strongly
held belief that actors should submerge their
identities and become complete instruments of
the director. He partially redeemed himself with
his 1940 production,
The Siberians,
which por-
trayed
STALIN
in a way that pleased the authori-
ties. From 1944 on, he taught again at the State
Film Institute (VGIK), but his creative spark no
longer burned as brightly from the pressures of
political harassment and World War II.
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