Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

This article examines a strange case from 1935, in the Usinsk region of Western Siberia. There, a local Communist Party Committee indicted a milk cow as a “kulak” cow, an enemy of the people, and, as a fine, assessed it several liters of milk a month. The owner of the cow, a veterinary assistant who had purchased the animal at an auction, complained to the oblast prosecutor, and the matter created serious tension. This article examines the broader implications of this seemingly absurd incident and argues that, in fact, it is the absurdity of the story that begs explanation and holds a clue to the meaning of the tale. The tale of the kulak cow reveals, in the extreme, the way in which categories of social identity and social stigmatization in Stalin’s socialism became blurred, loosed from their moorings in class and property relations. The indictment of a cow as an enemy of the people reveals more than just a pathological paranoia; it shows a regime unable to cope with the massive dislocation created by its own economic and social policies. The indictment of a cow was a sign, not of arrogance and power, but of weakness and instability, the instability of a state and a regime whose local officials felt simultaneously besieged by an unruly and often hostile population and forgotten by a demanding state.