What was Stalin's response to the Kulaks' defiance?
1 Answer
Stalin used mass deportation and planned starvation to deal with the Kulaks.
Explanation:
The Kulaks were small landowners that produced crops in a very efficient way and were considered by the Soviet authorities as enemies of the state; this was due to the fact that they were able to produce their own crops, sell them and get...more or less wealthy.
Although this seems normal, for the Soviet state this was bad. First of all they opposed the unification of the agricultural production into collective farms (kolkhoz) that were easily controlled by the central state and secondly they were able to create a micro-economy for themselves (making them a kind of Capitalists) and even employ people to work for them (an heresy in Bolshevik dogma).
The Kulaks were targeted by numerous persecutions so that they were deported and displaced from their land and sent to the most inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union (most of the time with no tools or means of surviving); also the central government harassed them confiscating their products and crops and pushing them into poverty and induced starvation, basically, exterminating their group.
