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86-567: Kulaks referred to former peasants in the Russian Empire who became landowners and credit-loaners after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and during the Stolypin reform of 1906 to 1914, which aimed to reduce radicalism amongst the peasantry and produce profit-minded, politically conservative farmers. During the Russian Revolution , kulak was used to chastise peasants who withheld grain from

172-507: A kulak ; they often used the term to label anyone who had more property than was considered normal according to subjective criteria, and personal rivalries also played a part in the classification of people as enemies. Officials arbitrarily applied the definition and abused their power. Conquest wrote: "The land of the landlords had been spontaneously seized by the peasantry in 1917–18. A small class of richer peasants with around fifty to eighty acres [20 to 32 ha] had then been expropriated by

258-488: A Soviet dissident , explained: "It was excruciating to see and hear all of this. And even worse to take part in it. ... And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn't give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan." Stalin issued an order for the kulaks "to be liquidated as

344-613: A class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes ." A decree by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 5 January 1930 was titled "On the pace of collectivization and state assistance to collective-farm construction." The official goal of " kulak liquidation" came without precise instructions, and encouraged local leaders to take radical action, which resulted in physical elimination. The campaign to "liquidate

430-463: A class"; according to Roman Serbyn , this was the main cause of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and was a genocide , while other scholars disagree and propose more than one cause. This famine has complicated attempts to identify the number of deaths arising from the executions of kulaks . A wide range of death tolls has been suggested, from as many as six million as suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , to

516-445: A fee. The third measure was that the serfs must pay the land-owner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which in turn, were used to compensate the landowners with bonds. The government would advance 75% of the total sum to the land-owner, and then the peasants would repay the government, plus interest, over forty-nine years. The government finally cancelled these redemption payments in 1907. The legal basis of

602-465: A larger social unit, who, thus identified, can be subjected to political repression. In political praxis, the term enemy of the people implies that political opposition to the ruling power group renders the people in opposition into enemies acting against the interests of the greater social unit: society, the nation, etc. In the 20th century, the politics of the Soviet Union (1922–1991) much featured

688-561: A local leader murdered a large number of uprising peasants in the village of Bezdna. When the incident was over, the official report counted 70 peasants dead and another 100 wounded. After further investigation, and trial of some members of the uprising, five peasants were found guilty of "agitation" and not uprising. That said, several different instances did take the form of an uprising. In Congress Poland and in northern Russia peasants became both free and landless (batraks), with only their labour to sell, while in other areas peasants became

774-589: A number of nationalist and pro-government politicians (most notably Ramzan Kadyrov ) calling for restoration of the Soviet approach to the "enemies of the people" defined as all non-system opposition . On 28 December 2022, Dmitry Medvedev , Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, said that Russians who fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and are opposed to the war should be labeled "enemies of society" and barred from returning to Russia. During

860-482: A quarter of the land, free. It was called pauper's allotment ( bednyatskiy nadel ). Many reform-minded peasants believed the manifesto's conditions were unacceptable: "In many localities the peasants refused to believe that the manifesto was genuine. There were troubles, and troops had to be called in to disperse the angry crowds." The land-owners and nobility were paid in government bonds, with their debts deducted. The bonds soon fell in value. The management skills of

946-509: A smaller scale after 1931 . The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521 . Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of the victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 people executed. Emancipation reform of 1861 The emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia , also known as

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1032-477: A spell, calling small children ' kulak bastards,' screaming 'bloodsuckers!' ... They had sold themselves on the idea that so-called ' kulaks ' were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a 'parasite's' table; the ' kulak ' child was loathsome, the young ' kulak ' girl was lower than a louse." Party activists brutalizing the starving villagers fell into cognitive dissonance , rationalizing their actions through ideology. Lev Kopelev , who later became

1118-558: Is "public enemy". Whereas "public" is currently used in English to describe something related to collectivity at large, with an implication towards government or the State, the Latin word "publicus" could, in addition to that meaning, also refer directly to people, making it the equivalent of the genitive of populus ("people"), populi ("popular" or "of the people"). Thus, "public enemy" and "enemy of

1204-469: Is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below. I ask you to think about the best way to carry this out The liberal politicians who stood behind the 1861 manifesto— Nikolay Milyutin , Alexei Strol'man and Yakov Rostovtsev —also recognized that their country was one of a few remaining feudal states in Europe . The pitiful display by Russian forces in

1290-513: The Bolsheviks . According to Marxist–Leninist political theories of the early 20th century, the kulaks were considered class enemies of the poorer peasants. Vladimir Lenin described them as "bloodsuckers, vampires , plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten themselves during famines", declaring revolution against them. During the first five-year plan , Joseph Stalin 's all-out campaign to take land ownership and organisation away from

1376-454: The Crimean War left the government acutely aware of the empire's weaknesses. Eager to grow and develop industrial and therefore military and political strength, they introduced a number of economic reforms. It was optimistically hoped that after the abolition the mir would dissolve into individual peasant land owners and the beginnings of a market economy. Alexander II , unlike his father,

1462-517: The Edict of Emancipation of Russia, ( Russian : Крестьянская реформа 1861 года , romanized :  Krestyanskaya reforma 1861 goda – "peasants' reform of 1861") was the first and most important of the liberal reforms enacted during the reign of Emperor Alexander II of Russia . The reform effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire . The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto proclaimed

1548-531: The Gulags , kulaks who were supposed to be relocated to distant provinces, such as the north Urals and Kazakhstan , kulaks who were supposed to be sent to other areas within their home provinces. The peasantry were required to relinquish their farm animals to government authorities. Many chose to slaughter their livestock rather than give them up to collective farms. In the first two months of 1930, peasants killed millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats, with

1634-553: The Latin : hostis publicus , a public enemy of the Roman Empire . In literature, the term enemy of the people features in the title of the stageplay An Enemy of the People (1882), by Henrik Ibsen , and is a theme in the stageplay Coriolanus (1605), by William Shakespeare . The expression enemy of the people dates to Imperial Rome . The Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus in 68 CE. Its direct translation

1720-520: The Sovnarkom issued a decree which formalised the notion of ' kulak household' ( кулацкое хозяйство ), according to which any of the following criteria defined a person as a kulak : In 1930, this list was expanded so it could include people who were renting industrial plants, e.g. sawmills , or people who rented land to other farmers. At the same time, the ispolkoms (executive committees of local Soviets) of republics, oblasts , and krais were granted

1806-496: The bourgeoisie , clerics , business entrepreneurs , anarchists , kulaks , monarchists , Mensheviks , Esers , Bundists , Trotskyists , Bukharinists , the " old Bolsheviks ", the army and police, emigrants , saboteurs , wreckers (вредители, "vrediteli"), " social parasites " (тунеядцы, "tuneyadtsy"), Kavezhedists (people who administered and serviced the Chinese Eastern Railway , abbreviated KVZhD, particularly

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1892-490: The kulaks as a class" constituted the main part of Stalin's social engineering policies in the early 1930s. Andrei Suslov argues that the seizure of peasants' property led directly to the destruction of an entire social group, that of the peasant‐owners. On 30 January 1930, the Politburo approved the dissolving of the kulaks as a class. Three categories of kulaks were distinguished: kulaks who were supposed to be sent to

1978-459: The large estate owners . They were to repay the credit (a kind of mortgage loan) from their farm earnings. By 1912, 16% of peasants (up from 11% in 1903) had relatively large endowments of over 3 ha (8 acres) per male family member (a threshold used in statistics to distinguish between middle-class and prosperous farmers, i.e. the kulaks ). At that time, an average farmer's family had 6 to 10 children. The number of such farmers amounted to 20% of

2064-497: The royal prerogative to bypass parliamentary approval. The paper issued character assassinations of all the judges involved in the ruling ( Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas , Sir Terence Etherton , and Lord Justice Sales ), and received more than 1,000 complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation . The Secretary of State for Justice , Liz Truss , issued a three-line statement defending

2150-407: The skhod ( sel'skii skhod ), appointed an elder ( starosta ) and a 'clerk' ( pisar ) to deal with any external issues. Although there were many regional differences and customs, peasants within a mir in central Russia shared land and resources. The strips were periodically redistributed within the villages to produce level economic conditions. The land however, was not owned by the mir ; the land

2236-425: The "well-to-do" serfs, along with previously free peoples, were able to purchase land as private property. While early in the reforms the creation of local government had not changed many things about Russian society, the rise in capitalism drastically affected not only the social structure of Russia, but the behaviors and activities of the self-government institutions. With new, capitalistic ideals, local government

2322-421: The ' kulaks ' as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development. ... That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class." From 1929 to 1933, the grain quotas were artificially heightened. Peasants attempted to hide the grain and bury it. According to historian Robert Conquest, every brigade

2408-549: The 1940s, and despite having been promised not to be punished, were immediately arrested as "enemies of the people". In 1990, Ismail Kadare applied for political asylum in France, which was granted, resulting in him being condemned by Albanian officials as an "enemy of the people". Regarding the Nazi plan to relocate all Jews to Madagascar , the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer wrote that "The Jews don't want to go to Madagascar – They cannot bear

2494-413: The 19th century. Judge Anatoly Koni compared kulaks to profiteers, arguing that they are not tied to the land by labor or personal memories, but by exploiting its resources and people. These sentiments are echoed in the writings of people such as Alexey Yermolov , Alexander Engelhardt , and Roman Zimmerman  [ ru ] . In his 1899 work Small public credit as a powerful means of combating

2580-453: The Bolsheviks. Thereafter a Marxist conception of class struggle led to an almost totally imaginary class categorization being inflicted in the villages, where peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [2 or 2.5 ha] more than their neighbors were now being labeled 'kulaks,' and a class war against them was being declared." In the summer of 1918, Moscow sent armed detachments to

2666-699: The Discovery of Crimes, of War Criminals and Enemies of the People requested the International Commission for the Discovery of Crimes and War Criminals to hand over a number of Albanian war criminals found in concentration camps in Italy such as Bari, Lecce, Salerno and others. In 1954, Hoxha condemned the American and British liberation of Albania calling them "enemies of the people". In the 1960s, many Albanian migrants returned from Austria and Italy after having fled in

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2752-452: The Russian government amongst individuals within the community. Due to the community's ownership of the land, as opposed to the individual's, an individual peasant could not sell his portion of the land to go work in a factory in the city. A peasant was required to pay off long-term loans received by the government. The money from these loans was given to the primary landowner. The land allotted to

2838-531: The Russian population of Harbin , China), and those considered bourgeois nationalists (notably Russian , Ukrainian , Belarusian , Armenian , Lithuanian , Latvian, and Estonian nationalists, as well as Zionists and the Basmachi movement ). After 1927, Article 20 of the Common Part of the penal code that listed possible "measures of social defence " had the following item 20a: "declaration to be an enemy of

2924-622: The Soviet Union , in Article 131 about public property: "Persons who encroach on public, socialist property are enemies of the people." The term "enemy of the workers" was formalized in the Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) , and similar articles in the codes of the other Soviet Republics . At various times these terms were applied, in particular, to Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial family , aristocrats ,

3010-671: The aftermath of the referendum on membership of the European Union , the Daily Mail was criticized for a headline describing judges (in the Miller case ) as "Enemies of the People" for ruling that the process for leaving the European Union (i.e. the triggering of Article 50 ) would require the consent of the British Parliament . The May administration had hoped to use the powers of

3096-585: The category of the people, while the social forces and groups which resist the socialist revolution and are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies of the people." Enemy of the people ( Alb : Armiku i popullit ) in Albania were the enemy typology of the Communist Albanian government used to denounce political or class opponents. The term is today considered totalitarian , derogatory and hostile . There are still some politicians who use

3182-401: The change to the Russian economy post-reform was the huge growth in non-gentry private landownership. While the gentry land-holdings fell from 80% to 50%, the peasant holdings grew from 5% to 20%. Enemy of the people The terms enemy of the people and enemy of the nation are designations for the political opponents and for the social-class opponents of the power group within

3268-490: The cities following the loss of their property to the collectives. The term was first used in the 19th century as a pejorative to refer to wealthier peasants who owned land and offered credit to poorer peasants. Soviet terminology divided the Russian peasants into three broad categories: In addition, they had a category of batrak , landless seasonal agricultural workers for hire. Various tsarist officials and their opposition had expressed negative views of kulaks as early as

3354-409: The climate. Jews are pests and disseminators of diseases. In whatever country they settle and spread themselves out, they produce the same effects as are produced in the human body by germs. ... In former times sane people and sane leaders of the peoples made short shrift of enemies of the people . They had them either expelled or killed." The term returned to post-Soviet Russia in the late 2000s with

3440-412: The definition of a kulak was later expanded to include those peasants who owned livestock; however, a middle peasant who did not hire laborers and was little engaged in trade "might yet (if he had a large family) hold three cows and two horses." There were other measures that indicated the kulaks as not being especially prosperous. Both peasants and Soviet officials were uncertain as to who constituted

3526-412: The emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of the domestic (household) serfs. By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty. Serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords. Household serfs were

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3612-404: The emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of the domestic (household) serfs. Serfs were granted the full rights of free citizens, gaining the rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto also permitted peasants to buy the land from the landlords. Mir communities had the power to distribute the land given to newly freed serfs by

3698-403: The ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven," Khrushchev said. "It made possible the use of the cruelest repression, violating all norms of [...] legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations ... The formula ‘enemy of the people’ was specifically introduced for

3784-439: The impoverishment of our peasants , governor of Penza Ivan Koshko noted that the kulaks had taken advantage of the inactivity of state-owned rural banks after the abolition of serfdom, forcing poorer peasants into private, predatory loans, thereby "[taking] over the entire peasant economy." He stated that as many as half of the 90 million peasant population were subjected to these exploitative relationships with kulaks , and that

3870-615: The independence and impartiality of the judiciary, which some saw as inadequate due to the delayed response and failure to condemn the attacks. In the United States during the 1960s, organizations such as the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic Society were known to use the term. In one inter-party dispute in February 1971, for example, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton denounced two other Panthers as "enemies of

3956-420: The land-owners were generally poor. Some Mir's did not enter the land redemption process at all, remaining as temporarily obligated peasants under their former owners until an 1881 decree made redemption compulsory. In 1883, concerned by rising levels of tax arrears, the government made a 13% cut (varying by commune, as a national average) to payment rates to combat the problem. Despite newly acquired freedom,

4042-408: The latter was able to at least roughly 500 million rubles annually. A few years later, after the turn of the century, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin would argue that becoming a kulak was the only way out of poverty for many, although at the expense of fellow peasants. The Stolypin reform also aided in the development of the kulak class by allowing peasants to acquire plots of land on credit from

4128-567: The least affected: they gained only their freedom and no land. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, a process which took place following a speech given by Tsar Alexander II on 30 March 1856. In Georgia , the emancipation took place later, in 1864, and on much better terms for the nobles than in Russia. State-owned serfs (those living on and working Imperial lands) were emancipated in 1866. Just prior to 1861 Russia had three main categories of peasants: Only those who were owned privately were considered serfs . They comprised an estimated 38% of

4214-459: The life of a serf remained grim in many aspects. Household serfs benefited the least, gaining their freedom, but no land. Many bureaucrats believed that these reforms would bring about drastic changes that would only affect the "lower stories" of society, strengthening the autocracy. In reality, the reforms forced the monarch to coexist with an independent court, free press, and local governments—all operating differently and more freely than they had in

4300-480: The majority land-owners in their province(s). The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto affected only the privately owned serfs. The state-owned serfs were emancipated in 1866 and were given better and larger plots of land. The reforms changed the Russian economy. The individuals who led the reform favored an economic system similar to that in other European countries, which promoted the ideas of capitalism and free trade. The reformers aimed to promote development and to encourage

4386-543: The meat and hides being consumed and bartered. For instance, the Soviet Party Congress reported in 1934 that 26.6 million head of cattle and 63.4 million sheep had been lost. In response to the widespread slaughter, the Sovnarkom issued decrees to prosecute "the malicious slaughtering of livestock" ( хищнический убой скота ). Stalin ordered severe measures to end kulak resistance. In 1930, he declared: "In order to oust

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4472-427: The much lower number of 700,000 as estimated by Soviet sources. According to data from the Soviet archives, which were only published internationally in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books which are based on these sources have stated that 1,317,022 people reached the final destinations . The fate of the remaining 486,370 people cannot be verified. Deportations continued on

4558-439: The ownership of private property, free competition, entrepreneurship, and hired labor. This they hoped would bring about an economic system with minimal regulations and tariffs, thus a more "laissez-faire" economy. Soon after the reforms there was a substantial rise in the amount of production of grain for sale. Because of this there was also a rise in the number of hired laborers and in farm machinery. Furthermore, an indicator of

4644-406: The past. This new form of local government involved in each area an assembly called a zemstvo . In regards to new localized government, the reforms put in place a system where the landowners were now able to have more of a say within their newly formed "provinces". While this was not the direct intent of the reforms, it was evident that this significantly weakened the idea of the autocracy. Now,

4730-465: The peasantry meant that, according to historian Robert Conquest , "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [2 or 2.5 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeled kulaks . In 1929, Soviet officials officially classified kulaks according to subjective criteria, such as the use of hired labour. Under dekulakization , government officials seized farms and executed many kulaks, deported others to labor camps , and drove many others to migrate to

4816-514: The peasants freedom but not any land. The tsar and his advisers, mindful of 1848 events in Western Europe, were opposed to creating a proletariat and the instability this could bring. But giving the peasants freedom and land seemed to leave the existing land-owners without the large and cheap labour-force they needed to maintain their estates and lifestyles. By 1859 however, a third of their estates and two-thirds of their serfs were mortgaged to

4902-604: The people" are, etymologically, near synonyms . The words ennemi du peuple were used extensively during the French Revolution . On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated: "The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death". The Law of 22 Prairial in 1794 extended the remit of the Revolutionary Tribunal to punish "enemies of

4988-512: The people" for allegedly putting party leaders and members in jeopardy. In 2020 the Committee to Protect Journalists published a special report by Leonard Downie Jr. titled "The Trump Administration and the Media". In the very beginning the report stated: Trump has habitually attacked the news media in rallies, responses to reporters’ questions, and many hundreds of tweets. He has repeatedly called

5074-485: The people", and Vladimir Lenin invoked it in his decree of 28 November 1917: ...all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party , a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court. Other similar terms were in use as well: The term "enemy of the people" was used in the 1936 Constitution of

5160-572: The people", with some political crimes punishable by death, including "spreading false news to divide or trouble the people". The Soviet Union made extensive use of the term vrag naroda (Russian: враг народа ), literally meaning enemy of the people . The term was first used in a speech by Felix Dzerzhinsky , the first chairman of the Cheka , after the October Revolution . The Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee printed lists of "enemies of

5246-446: The people. Many who were targeted held important leadership positions in the party and state structures of the regime. Hoxha also used the term against the Soviet Union and the US when he spoke: "as to ’Albania being only one mouthful’, watch out, gentlemen, for socialist Albania is a hard bone that will stick in your throat and choke you!" . On 1 June 1945, The Albanian Central Commission for

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5332-458: The phrase "enemy of the people" as they were very nationalistic and saw it as an alien import. In 1957, in the speech and in the essay On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People , Mao said that: "At the present stage, the period of building socialism, the classes, strata and social groups which favour, support and work for the cause of socialist construction all come within

5418-471: The policy of dekulakization ( раскулачивание ) at the beginning of the 1930s was only 170–400 rubles (US$ 90–210) per household. During the height of Collectivization in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, people who were identified as kulaks were subjected to deportation and extrajudicial punishments . They were frequently murdered in local campaigns of violence, while others were formally executed after they were convicted of being kulaks . In May 1929,

5504-476: The population. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, who had great power over their lives. The rural population lived in households ( dvory , singular dvor ), gathered as villages ( derevni ; a derevnya with a church became a selo ), run by a mir ('commune', or obshchina in official terms). Imperial Russia had around 20 million dvory , forty percent of them containing six to ten people. The mir assembly,

5590-577: The purpose of physically annihilating such individuals." For decades afterwards, the phrase "was so omnipresent, freighted and devastating in its use under Stalin that nobody [in Russia] wanted to touch it. ... except in reference to history and in jokes", according to William Taubman in his biography of Khrushchev. According to Philip Short , an author of biographies of Mao Zedong and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot , in domestic political struggles Chinese and Cambodian communists rarely if ever used

5676-399: The recently freed serfs did not include the best land in the country, which remained in the hands of the nobility. The implementation of land settlement varied over the vast and diverse territory of the Russian Empire, but typically a peasant had rights to buy out about half of the land he cultivated for himself. If he could not afford to pay it off, he would receive a half of the half, i.e.,

5762-457: The reform was the Tsar 's Emancipation Manifesto of 3 March [ O.S. 19 February] 1861, accompanied by the set of legislative acts under the general name Regulations Concerning Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence ( Russian : Положения о крестьянах, выходящих из крепостной зависимости Polozheniya o krestyanakh, vykhodyashchikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti ). This Manifesto proclaimed

5848-425: The right to add other criteria to the list so other people could be classified as kulaks , depending on local conditions. In July 1929, official Soviet policy continued to state that the kulaks should not be terrorized and should be enlisted into the collective farms , but Stalin disagreed: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks , break their resistance, eliminate them as

5934-570: The rural population, producing almost 50% of marketable grain. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the Soviets and proletariat; serednyaks were considered unreliable, hesitating allies, and kulaks were identified as class enemies , with the term generally referring to "peasant producers who hired labourers or exploited their neighbours in some other way" according to historian Robert W. Davies . Robert Conquest argues that

6020-414: The same landowners to pay their "labor payments", they often neglected their own fields. Over the next few years, the yields from the peasants' crops remained low, and soon famine struck a large portion of Russia. With little food, and finding themselves in a similar condition as when they were serfs, many peasants started to voice their disdain for the new social system. On one occasion, on 12 April 1861,

6106-475: The same with leather and shoe soles ... ." The party activists who helped the State Political Directorate (the secret police) with arrests and deportations were, in the words of Vasily Grossman , "all people who knew one another well, and knew their victims, but in carrying out this task they became dazed, stupefied." Grossman commented: "They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under

6192-497: The state or noble banks. This was why they had to accept the emancipation. To 'balance' this, the legislation contained three measures to reduce the potential economic self-sufficiency of the peasants. Firstly a transition period of two years was introduced, during which the peasant was obligated as before to the old land-owner. Secondly large parts of common land were passed to the major land-owners as otrezki ("cut off lands"), making many forests, roads and rivers accessible only for

6278-460: The state response to kulak revolts due to the 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of the White Terror . He summarised his view that either the " kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of the predatory kulak minority […] There can be no middle course". The average value of the goods which were confiscated from the kulaks during

6364-428: The term enemy of the people to discredit any opposition, especially during the régime of Stalin (r. 1924–1953), when it was often applied to Trotsky . In the 21st century, the former U.S. president Donald Trump (r. 2017–2021) regularly used the enemy of the people term against critical politicians and journalists. Like the term enemy of the state , the term enemy of the people originated and derives from

6450-529: The term on political opponents with the intention of dehumanization. After the communist takeover, many who were labeled with this term were executed or imprisoned . Enver Hoxha declared religious leaders, landowners, disloyal party officials, clerics and clan leaders as "enemies of the people". This is said to have led to the death of 6,000 people. Thousands were sentenced to death. From 1945 to 1992, around 5,000 men and women were executed and close to 100,000 were sent to prison as they were labeled enemies of

6536-604: The villages and ordered them to seize grain. Peasants who resisted the seizures were killed. According to Richard Pipes , "the Communists declared war on the rural population for two purposes: to forcibly extract food for growing industry (so-called First five-year plan ) in cities and the Red Army and insinuate their authority into the countryside, which remained largely unaffected by the Bolshevik coup." A large-scale revolt ensued, and it

6622-605: The workers with deprivation of the union republic citizenship and hence of the USSR citizenship , with obligatory expulsion from its territory". Nevertheless, most "enemies of the people" suffered labor camps, rather than expulsion. On 25 February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech to the Communist Party in which he identified Stalin as the author of the phrase and distanced himself from it, saying that it made debate impossible. "This term automatically made it unnecessary that

6708-483: Was during this period in August 1918 that Vladimir Lenin sent a directive known as Lenin's Hanging Order : "Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks , rich men, bloodsuckers. ... Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [kilometers] around the people will see, tremble, know, shout : they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks ." Lenin had justified

6794-456: Was equipped with a long iron bar which it would use to probe the ground for grain caches and peasants who did not show signs of starvation were especially suspected of hiding food. Conquest states: "When the snow melted true starvation began. People had swollen faces and legs and stomachs. They could not contain their urine... And now they ate anything at all. They caught mice, rats, sparrows, ants, earthworms. They ground up bones into flour, and did

6880-517: Was largely restored once Russia took over in 1815. Serfdom was abolished in governorates of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819. In 1797, Paul I of Russia decreed that corvee labor was limited to 3 days a week, and never on Sunday, but this law was not enforced. Beginning in 1801, Alexander I of Russia appointed a committee to study possible emancipation, but its only effect

6966-532: Was not responsible for the rules and regulations dictating how the new market would operate. If there was a positive of this movement towards localized government, from the autocracy's point of view; it was (as Petr Valuev put it): the zemstvo would "provide activity for the considerable portion of the press as well as those malcontents who currently stir up trouble because they have nothing to do". The serfs of private estates received less land than they needed to survive, which led to civil unrest. The redemption tax

7052-424: Was so high that the serfs had to sell all the grain they produced to pay the tax, which left nothing for their survival. Landowners also suffered because many of them were deeply in debt, and the forced selling of their land left them struggling to maintain their lavish lifestyle. In many cases, the newly freed serfs were forced to "rent" their land from wealthy landowners. Furthermore, when the peasants had to work for

7138-447: Was the legal property of the 100,000 or so landowners ( pomeshchiks , an equivalent of " landed gentry ") and the inhabitants, as serfs, were typically not allowed to leave the property where they were born. The peasants were duty-bound to make regular payments in labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income and production by the first half of the nineteenth century. The need for urgent reform

7224-413: Was to prohibit the sale of serfs without their families. Beginning in 1825, Nicholas I of Russia expressed his desire for emancipation on many occasions, and even improved the lives of serfs on state properties, but did not change the condition of serfs on private estates. My intention is to abolish serfdom ... you can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It

7310-499: Was well understood in 19th-century Russia. Much support for it emanated from universities, authors and other intellectual circles. Various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky , Nikolay Mordvinov , and Pavel Kiselyov . However, conservative or reactionary nobility thwarted their efforts. In Western guberniyas serfdom was abolished early in the century. In Congress Poland , serfdom had been abolished before it became Russian (by Napoleon in 1807), but it

7396-498: Was willing to deal with this problem. Moving on from a petition from the Lithuanian provinces, a committee "for ameliorating the condition of the peasants" was founded and the principles of the abolition considered. The main point at issue was whether the serfs should remain dependent on the landlords, or whether they should be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors. The land-owners initially pushed for granting

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