Page 60 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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commanding that a certain number of these "kulaks" be rounded and
executed. This is described in The Black Book of Communism:
In such conditions, it is not surprising that in certain districts between 80
and 90 percent of those victimized by the dekulakization process were
serednyaki, or m middle-income peasants. The brigades had to meet the re-
quired quotas and, if possible, surpass them. Peasants were arrested and
deported for having sold grain on the market or for having had an em-
ployee to help with the harvest back in 1925 or 1926, for possessing two
samovars, for having killed a pig in September 1929 "with the intention of
consuming it themselves and thus keeping it from socialist appropria-
tion." Peasants were arrested on the pretext that they had "taken part in
commerce," when all they had done was sell something of their own
making. One peasant was deported on the pretext that his uncle had been
a tsarist officer; another was labeled a kulak on account of his "excessive
visits to the church." But most often, people were classed as kulaks sim-
ply on the grounds that they had resisted collectivization. At times confu-
sion reigned in the dekulakization brigades to an almost comic extreme:
in one city in Ukraine, for example, a serednyak who was a member of a
dekulakization brigade was himself arrested by a member of another
brigade that was operating on the other side of the town.
At the top of the list of those branded as kulaks were the clergy. In
1930, more than 13,000 priests were "dekulakized." In many villages and
towns, collectivization began symbolically with the closing of the church
and the removal of local religious leaders. 45
Collectivization had two major results: famine and exile.

Famine Brought About by Stalin

Like Lenin before him, Stalin intended to wield collectivization as a
weapon against society. By collecting as much grain as he wanted from
any section of the country, he subjected any people in those areas to star-
vation. Because Ukraine resisted Communism, it became the target of
collectivization. This region suffered the greatest man-made famine in
history, with a total of four million dying of starvation.
How this occurred is significant. First, according to the state's gen-