Why Are You Constantly Yelling about Kulaks?

Of course, only a small proportion of peasants had any sort of wealth at all, and only a tiny proportion of farms employed paid workers. “Why are you constantly yelling about kulaks?” the cadres were asked in one village. “We have no kulaks here.” Some of the poorer peasants, whom the regime tried to turn against the richer villagers, could see what was coming: “Now they are confiscating bread from the kulaks; tomorrow they will turn against the middle and poor peasant.” In the spring of 1930 they slaughtered their last cows rather than hand them over; not even the Germans eleven years later would inflict such damage on Soviet cattle stocks.

--Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 118-119.