Stalin Orders Liquidation of Kulaks: Terror Spreads
Stalin called them kulaks — better-off peasants, anyone with a cow and hired help at harvest. On this day he ordered their liquidation as a class. Not prosecution. Liquidation. Within months, Soviet officials were deporting entire families to Siberia in unheated freight cars, confiscating farms, executing resisters on sight. The quotas were explicit: each region had to deliver X number of kulaks, whether they existed or not. Villages that had already been "dekulakized" got raided again. Roughly 1.8 million were deported, half a million executed outright, millions more starved when collectivization destroyed harvests. Stalin eliminated the people who knew how to grow food, then blamed them for the famine that followed.
December 27, 1929
97 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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