Who are the Fists?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This conversation will focus on kulaks and such a phenomenon as the kulaks.

Where did the word "fist" come from? There are many versions. One of the most widespread versions today is the fist, this is a strong business executive who keeps his entire household in a fist. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, another version was more widespread.

One of the main ways of enriching the kulak is giving money or grain to grow. That is: the kulak gives money to its fellow villagers, or gives grain, the seed fund to the poor fellow villagers. Gives with pretty decent percentages. Due to this, he ruins these fellow villagers, due to this he becomes richer.

How did this fist get its money or grain back? So he gave, let's say, grain for growth - this happens, for example, in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, that is, before dispossession of kulaks. According to the law, the kulak has no right to engage in such activities, that is, no usury for individuals, no credit practice was provided. It turns out that he was engaged in activities that, in fact, were illegal. It can be assumed, of course, that he applied to a Soviet court with a request that his debt be recovered from the debtor. But most likely, it happened differently, that is, there was a banal knocking out of what the debtor owes. It was the extremely tough policy of knocking out debts that gave the kulaks their name.

So who are the fists?

There is a widespread belief that these are the most hardworking peasants who, began to live more richly due to their heroic labor, due to greater skill and hard work. However, the fists were not called those who are richer, who live more satisfyingly.

Fists were called those who used the labor of farm laborers, that is, hired labor, and those who engaged in usury in the countryside. That is, a kulak is a person who gives money in growth, buys up the land of his fellow villagers, and gradually depriving them of land, use them as hired labor.

Fists appeared long before the revolution, and in principle it was a fairly objective process. That is, with the improvement of the land cultivation system, the most normal objective phenomenon is the increase in land plots. A larger field is easier to process, it turns out to be cheaper to process. Large fields can be cultivated with machinery - processing of each individual tithe is cheaper, and, accordingly, such farms are more competitive.

All countries that passed from the agrarian to the industrial phase went through an increase in the size of land allotments. This is clearly illustrated by the example of American farmers, who today are few in the United States, but whose fields stretch far beyond the horizons. This refers to the fields of each individual farmer. Therefore, the consolidation of land plots is not only a natural fact, but even a necessary one. In Europe, this process was called pauperization: land-poor peasants were driven from the land, the land was bought up and passed into the possession of landlords or rich peasants.

What happened to the poor peasants? Usually they were driven out to cities, where they either went to the army, to the navy, in the same England, or got a job at enterprises; or begging, robbing, starving to death. To combat this phenomenon, laws against the poor were introduced in England at one time.

And a similar process began in the Soviet Union. It began after the civil war, when the land was redistributed according to the number of eaters, but at the same time the land was in full use of the peasants, that is, the peasant could sell, mortgage, donate the land. This was what the fists took advantage of. For the Soviet Union, the very situation with the transfer of land to the kulaks was not very acceptable, since it was associated exclusively with the exploitation of some peasants by other peasants.

There is an opinion that the kulaks were dispossessed according to the principle - if you have a horse, it means that a well-to-do person means a fist. This is not true.

The fact is that the availability of means of production also implies that someone has to work for them. For example, if there are 1-2 horses on the farm, which are used as traction, it is clear that the peasant can work himself. If the farm has 5-10 horses as a pulling force, it is clear that the peasant himself cannot work on this, that he must definitely hire someone who will use these horses.

There were only two criteria for defining a fist. As I already said, this is an occupation of usurious activity and the use of hired labor.

Another thing is that by indirect signs - for example, the presence of a large number of horses or a large number of equipment - it was possible to determine that this fist was actually used by hired labor.

And it became necessary to determine what the further path of development of the village will be. The fact that it was necessary to enlarge the farms was quite obvious. However, the path going through pauperization (through the ruin of the poor peasants and their expulsion from the countryside, or their transformation into hired labor), it was actually very painful, very long and promised really big sacrifices; example from England.

The second path that has been considered is to get rid of the kulaks and to carry out the collectivization of agriculture. Although there were supporters of both options in the leadership of the Soviet Union, those who advocated collectivization won. Accordingly, the kulaks, which were precisely the competition for the collective farms, had to be eliminated. It was decided to dekulakize the kulaks, as socially alien elements, and transfer their property to the collective farms that are being created.

What was the scale of this dispossession?

Of course, many peasants were dispossessed. In total, more than 2 million people have been dispossessed - this is almost half a million families. At the same time, dispossession of kulaks went in three categories: the first category is those who resisted the Soviet regime with weapons in their hands, that is, the organizers and participants of uprisings and terrorist acts. The second category is other kulak activists, that is, people who opposed Soviet power, fought against it, but passively, that is, without using weapons. And finally, the third category is just fists.

What was the difference between the categories?

The fists belonging to the first category were occupied by the "OGPU troikas", that is, some of these kulaks were shot, some of these kulaks were sent to the camps. The second category includes families of kulaks in the first category, and kulaks and their families in the second category. They were expelled to remote places in the Soviet Union. The third category - they were also subject to expulsion, but expulsion within the region where they lived. This is how, for example, in the Moscow region, to evict from the outskirts of Moscow to the outskirts of the region. All these three categories recruited more than 2 million people with family members.

Is it a lot or a little? In fact, statistically, this is about one kulak family per village, that is, one village - one kulak. In some villages, of course, several families of kulaks were evicted, but this only means that in other villages there were no kulaks at all, they were not there.

And now more than 2 million kulaks were evicted. Where were they evicted? There is an opinion that they were evicted to Siberia, thrown almost into the snow, without property, without food, without anything, to certain destruction. In fact, this is also not true. Most of the kulaks, indeed, who were resettled in other regions of the country, they were resettled in Siberia. But they were used as so-called labor settlers - they built new cities. For example, when we are talking about the heroic builders of Magnitka and we are talking about dispossessed people deported to Siberia, often we are talking about the same people. And the best example of this is the family of the first president of the Russian Federation. The fact is that his father was just dispossessed, and his further career developed in Sverdlovsk, as a foreman.

What terrible repressions were used against the kulaks? But here it is quite obvious, since he became a foreman among the workers, then probably the repressions were not very cruel. Loss of rights, too, how to say, given that the son of a kulak later became the First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee.

Of course, there were quite numerous distortions during dispossession of kulaks, that is, sometimes there really was a situation when they tried to declare the middle peasants as kulaks. There were moments when envious neighbors managed to slander someone, but such cases were isolated. In fact, the villagers themselves determined who their fist was in the village and who needed to get rid of. It is clear that justice did not always prevail here, but the decision about who the kulaks were was not made from above, not by the Soviet government, it was made by the villagers themselves. It was determined according to the lists provided by the commissars, that is, the inhabitants of this very village, and it was decided who the fist was and what to do with it further. The villagers also determined the category to which the fist would be classified: it is a malicious fist or, let's say, simply a world eater.

Moreover, the problem of kulaks also existed in the Russian Empire, where rich peasants managed to crush the village under themselves. Although the rural community itself partly protected from the growth of kulak land tenure, and kulaks began to emerge mainly after the Stolypin reform, when some became rich, they actually bought up all the land of their fellow villagers, forced their fellow villagers to work for themselves, became large sellers of bread, in fact, they became already the bourgeoisie.

There was another picture, when the same fellow villagers, declaring the kulak a world eater, safely drowned him in a nearby pond, because in fact all the kulak's wealth is based on what he was able to take from his fellow villagers. The fact is that no matter how well people work in the countryside … why can't a hardworking middle peasant be allowed to become a fist? His wealth is limited by the size of his land holdings. As long as he uses the land that his family received according to the principle of dividing according to the number of eaters, this peasant will not be able to get much wealth, because the yield in the fields is quite limited. It works well, it does not work well, a relatively small field leads to the fact that the peasant remains rather poor. In order for a peasant to become rich, he must take something from other peasants, that is, this is precisely the displacement and landlessness of his fellow villagers.

If we talk about the terrible repressions against the kulaks and their children, then there is a very good resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, which says: “Children of special settlers and exiles, upon reaching the age of sixteen, if they are not defamed by anything, should be issued passports on a general basis and not repaired they have obstacles to leaving for study or work”. The date of this decree is October 22, 1938.

Collectivization turned out to be an alternative way of gradual enlargement of farms due to pauperization. The peasants in those villages where there were no more kulaks left were gradually reduced to collective farms (by the way, more often than not, quite voluntarily for themselves) and it turned out that there was a common field for one village, quite extensive, for which the equipment was allocated with the help of which this field and processed. In fact, only the kulaks were the victims of collectivization. And the kulaks, no matter how numerous the victims were, accounted for less than 2% of the entire rural population of the Soviet Union. As I said earlier, this is about one family per one rather large village.