Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The article discusses the methods of defining various social groups in rural areas, the process of their transformation in the 1920s - early 1930s with the emphases on the groups of “kulaks”. Their interpretation in the historical literature is ambiguous, which is related to different attitudes and understanding by the authorities and population of that time, the absence of clear criteria to define them, their periodic revision. Based on the analysis of the archival sources, the author comes to conclusion that by the end of the 1920s the criteria for defining individual social groups (“farmhand”, “pauper”, “medium peasant”, “substantial farmer”, “kulak”) were developed mainly by the provincial, district and local authorities, individual organizations, which had different approaches to their revealing. The studied methods of the peasantry differentiation allowed paying attention to some points: first, the allowable property norms (livestock, land) for the same social groups were different; secondly, the majority of them separated kulak farms from well-to-do ones, and according to the logic of their definition, the labor farms were well-to-do, and kulak farms were those who lived on unearned incomes and used labor exploitation. In the late 1920s the criteria for kulak farms started to be established by “higher-ups”, the central government, and were included in the legal regulatory framework permitting to change them taking into account local peculiarities. The kulak features were periodically corrected, detailed, adjusting to the goals and objectives of the state. Gradually, the government obtained clearer differentiation of population, eliminating the transitional status that allowed peasants to belong to two groups at once, and ultimately refused such groups as “substantial farmer” and “strong medium peasant”.