Word: kulak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Britain's Economist last month. "It will strengthen the dominion of Ethiopia's ignorant rulers. The weather is the only calamity not directly caused by Colonel Mengistu . . . and his cronies. Their Russian advisers have taught them to run vast state farms that produce no food. Imitating Stalin's anti-kulak terror, they have shot 'hoarders and saboteurs' prudent enough to store grain . . . Help for the starving may make some of them suffer more, and reinforce the grip of the government that caused them to starve. Yet something must be done...
Stalin, Conquest says, viewed the country's 120 million peasants as irremediably hostile to the regime. Individualistic and intractable, they would have to be torn from their bit of private land and either tamed by force or annihilated. Stalin's first target was the kulaks, caricatured as rich, greedy and brutal farmers who lived off the labor of others. Actually, they were the hardest working and the most productive of the peasants. The wealth of the average kulak family consisted of one to three cows and ten to 25 acres of land. Nevertheless, beginning in 1929, more than 13 million...