Who did the Communists under Stalin consider "Kulaks"?
1 Answer
The term Kulaks was used to indicate landowners of small allotments that could grow their own crops and even have people working for them.
Explanation:
The Kulaks were an aberration in the eyes of the Bolshevik authorities of the Soviet Union; they not only owned land but (even worse) they had people working for them!
The Kulaks received a strong impulse in the early stages of the Russian Revolution after the terrible civil war between Bolsheviks and White Russians. The economy was in ruin and so the central government (Lenin) decided to ease a bit the communist approach to economy letting people to own small allotments of land and sell or buy products and goods without the interference of the state.
Needles to say that his situation didn't last long. In particular, after the death of Lenin and the election of Stalin as leader of the government, the situation was reversed. Not only there wasn't any possibility of private owned land or free commerce but, under Stalin, agriculture had to become organized (and controlled) from the central government into cooperatives of collectivized farmers (kolkhoz). The bonus for Stalin, was the possibility to point the finger to the Kulaks accusing them to work against the revolution.
Stalin used a politic of persecuting various portions of the society to induce a kind of perpetual imbalance or conflict between state and society to be able to maintain the power (exactly as a dictator decides to declare a war to steer away the attention of the masses from internal problems). The Kulaks were (together with former Tsarists officers or White Russian, Priests, Anarchists or other) one of the favorite targets of Stalin's unfortunate attentions.
[The persecution of the fat and rich Kulak that enslaves and corrupts the honest worker...]
