peasants' kulak: Social identities and moral economy in the Soviet countryside in the 1920s, The

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Dec 2000 by Lynne Viola

Another category of transgressor of the moral-political code of the village with special reference to Politics with a capital "P" was a group which more accurately falls under the heading of burzhui or simply enemies. These were the byvshie liudi (literally "former people") who represented political, social, and economic elites from the prerevolutionary order and could include landlords, estate managers, priests, police, and other tsarist officials, as well as kulaks, traders, and millers. Both peasant letters and peasant court cases provide evidence pertaining to the continuing conflict between peasants and byvshie liudi. For instance, according to the peasant Dyshler, former landlords remained eternal (bessmertnyi) enemies.82 As one peasant put it, "if a landlord comes from Paris wearing bask sandals [lapti], does that make him a proletariat?"83 Many peasants complained of continued struggles with their former landlords, who had remained in the countryside and who, they felt, were still managing to take advantage of them.84 Often, conflicts between peasants and landlords were worked out in the courts, with the higher courts (free of local influences) generally siding with the peasants.85 Other cases over land and sometimes disputes arising from land reform (zemleustroistvo) involved priests, prerevolutionary kulaks, traders, millers, and other manner of byvshie liudi. 86

The moral-political use of the term kulak was equally, if not more, serviceable in the smaller world of community politics. Moreover, if the capital "P" sense of kulak was likely to have been wielded by peasants politicized in the new Soviet culture or by those conscious or presumptuous of a proletarian status, the small "p" sense of the kulak was more universally used. Peasants were labeled kulaks for violating moral-political codes or standards of village behavior. These violations were discussed with explicit application of moral language. Historian V.I. Korotaev noted that in skhod decisions in the North peasants generally made use of moral language: what is just or unjust, who is lazy or ambitious, who is chuzhoi (alien) or svoi (one of us).87 In the mid- 1920s, the agrarian specialist A.I. Khriashcheva stressed that peasants often used the word kulak as a simple pejorative, that the term kulak did not refer to a social category, but rather was a moral term like "cheat" (glut) or "scoundrel" (negodiai).88 In a Penza district, it was noted that peasants called middle peasants kulaks if they were miserly, worked all the time, did not drink or celebrate holidays.89 The Komsomol Lysenkov provided some insight into this sense of a kulak when he wrote that one distinguishes a kulak "according to his actions, according to his way of life, that is, is he honest, does he run his farm according to law ....."90 Other peasants exempted possibly clear-cut candidates for kulakdom such as rich farmers, millers, and sometimes even traders if they were honest and hard-working.91 A good example of this tendency is provided by the peasant Liuboslavskii of Novgorod guberniia. Liuboslavskii wrote that "psychological" elements were important in identifying kulaks. He cited the case of an honest, wealthy farmer who was widely respected in his village. The farmer helped the poor, but did not demand a percentage (interest) or work in return, and worked his farm with his own labor. By contrast, Liuboslavskii pointed to a middle peasant, who in his mind was a kulak because he was miserly.92 In both cases, the peasant norm of reciprocity, so central to the moral economy, shaped Liuboslavskii's judgment: a kulak was the secure peasant who failed to live up to his obligation to help his needier neighbors. 93