Due to the political pressure of new regulations for disenfranchisement in the 1927 election campaign and expropriation by the introduction of an excessive and prohibitive individual taxation in 1928, the number of kulaks started to decrease. This process was called self-dekulakization, meaning the selling of means of production, reducing the rent of land, and the leasing of implements to poorer farms. It was easy for the kulak to bring himself socially and economically down to the situation of a middle peasant. He only had to sell his agricultural machine, dismiss his batrak (hired laborer), or close his enterprise for there to be nothing left of the kulak as defined by the law. Several kulaks sought to escape the blows by flight to the towns, to other villages, or even into the kolkhozy if they were admitted.
On December 27, 1929, Stalin announced the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, that is, their expropriation and deportation. For the sake of the general collectivization the kulaks were divided into three different groups. The first category, the so-called “counterrevolutionary kulak-activists, fighting against collectivization” should be either arrested or shot on the spot; their families were to be deported. The second category, “the richest kulaks,” were to be deported together with their families into remote areas. The rest of the kulaks were to be resettled locally. The Politburo not only planned the deportation of kulaks, ordering between 3 to 5 percent of the peasant farms to be liquidated and their means of production to be given to the kolkhoz, but also fixed the exact number of deportees and determined their destinations. The kulaks were clearly needed as class enemies to drive the collectivization process forward: After the liquidation of the kulaks in early 1930, and during the second major wave of collectivization in 1931, the Politburo ordered a certain percentage of the remaining peasant farms to be defined as kulaks and liquidated. Even if a peasant was obviously not wealthy, the term podkulak (walking alongside the
KULESHOV, LEV VLADIMIROVICH
kulaks) enabled the worker brigades to expropriate and arrest him.
Between 1930 and 1933, some 600,000 to 800,000 peasant households consisting of 3.5 to 5 million people, were declared to be kulaks, expropriated, and turned out of their houses. As local resettlement proved difficult, deportation hit more families than originally planned. By the end of 1931, about 380,000 to 390,000 kulak households consisting of about two million people were deported and brought to special settlements in remote areas, mostly in northern Russia or Siberia. Between 1933 and 1939, another 500,000 people reached the special settlements, mostly deportees from the North Caucasus during the famine of 1933. About one-fourth of the deportees did not survive the transport or the first years in the special settlements. After the new constitution of 1936, the term kulak fell out of use. At the beginning of 1941, 930,000 people were still registered in the special settlements. They were finally reinstated with their civilian rights during or shortly after World War II. See also: CLASS SYSTEM; COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; COOPERATIVE SOCIETIES; EMANCIPATION ACT; PEASANTRY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frierson, Cathy Anne. (1992). From Narod to Kulak: Peasant Images in Russia, 1870-1885. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Lewin, Moshe. (1966/1967). “Who was the Soviet Kulak?” Soviet Studies 18:189 -212. Merl, Stephan. (1990). “Socio-economic Differentiation of the Peasantry.” In From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR, ed. Robert W. Davies. London: Macmillan Press. Viola, Lynne. (1996). Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press.
tionized the art of filmmaking in the 1920s. One of the few Young Turks to have had significant prerevolutionary experience in cinema, Kuleshov was employed by the Khanzhonkov studio as an art director in 1916 and worked with the great Russian director Yevgeny Bauer until Bauer’s death in 1917. Kuleshov’s first movie as a director was Engineer Prite’s Project (1918). During the Russian Civil War he organized newsreel production at the front.
In 1919 he founded a filmmaking workshop in Moscow that came to be known as the Kuleshov collective. Because of the shortage of film stock during the civil war, the collective shot “films without film,” which is to say that they staged rehearsals. Several important directors and actors emerged from the collective, including Boris Barnet, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, and Vladimir Fogel.
Kuleshov also became known as the leading experimentalist and theorist among the Soviet Union’s future cinema artists, and published his ideas extensively. His most famous was known as the “Kuleshov effect.” By juxtaposing different images with the same shot of the actor Ivan Moz-zhukhin, Kuleshov demonstrated the relationship between editing and the spectator’s perception. Although there is some debate about the validity of the experiment in the early twenty-first century, at the time it was widely reported that viewers insisted that Mozzhukhin’s expression changed according to the montage. His published his film theories in 1929 as The Art of the Cinema.
Kuleshov made a series of brilliant but highly criticized movies in the 1920s, most important among them The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) and By the Law (1926). Even before the Cultural Revolution (1928-1931), Kuleshov had been attacked as a “formalist,” and his career as a director essentially ended in 1933 with The Great Consoler. In 1939 Kuleshov joined the faculty of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography and taught directing to a new generation of Soviet filmmakers.
KULESHOV, LEV VLADIMIROVICH
(1899-1970), film director and theorist.
Along with Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pu-dovkin, and Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov revoluSee also: BAUER, YEVGENY FRANTSEVICH; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH; MOTION PICTURES
Kuleshov, Lev.(1974). Kuleshov on Film: Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Youngblood, Denise J. (1991). Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935. Austin: University of Texas Press.
bravery of the Rus forces, has created a legendary aura about the battle. See also: DONSKOY, DMITRY IVANOVICH; GOLDEN HORDE; KIEVAN RUS
On September 8, 1380, Rus forces led by Grand Prince Dmitry Ivanovich fought and defeated a mixed (including Tatar, Alan, Circassian, Genoese, and Rus) army led by the Emir Mamai on Kulikovo Pole (Snipe’s Field) at the Nepryadva River, a tributary of the Don. As a result of the victory, Dmitry received the sobriquet “Donskoy.” Estimates of numbers who fought in the battle vary widely. According to Rus chronicles, between 150,000 and 400,000 fought on Dmitry’s side. One late chronicle places the number fighting on Mamai’s side at 900,030. Historians have tended to downgrade these numbers, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 240,000 for Dmitry and 200,000 to 300,000 for Mamai.
The circumstances of the battle involved politics within the Qipchaq Khanate. Mamai attempted to oust Khan Tokhtamish, who had established himself in Sarai in 1378. In order to raise revenue, Mamai intended to require tribute payments from the Rus princes. Dmitry organized the Rus princes to resist Mamai and, in effect, to support Tokhtamish. As part of his strategy, Mamai had attempted to coordinate his forces with those of Jagailo, the grand duke of Lithuania, but the battle occurred before the Lithuanian forces arrived. After fighting most of the day, Mamai’s forces left the field, presumably because he was defeated, although some historians think he intended to conserve his army to confront Tokhtamish. Dmitry’s forces remained at the scene of the battle for several days, and on the way back to Rus were set upon by the Lithuania forces under Jagailo, which, too late to join up with Mamai’s army, nonetheless managed to wreak havoc on the Rus troops.
Although the numbers involved in the battle were immense, and although the battle led to the weakening of Mamai’s army and its eventual defeat by Tokhtamish, the battle did not change the vassal status of the Rus princes toward the Qipchaq khan. A cycle of literary works, including Zadon-shchinai (Battle beyond the Don) and Skazanie o Ma-maevom poboishche (Tale of the Rout of Mamai), devoted to ever-more elaborate embroidering of the
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