kulak

American  

[koo-lahk, -lak, koo-lahk, -lak] / kʊˈlɑk, -ˈlæk, ˈku lɑk, -læk /

noun

1. a comparatively wealthy peasant who employed hired labor or possessed farm machinery and who was viewed and treated by the Communists during the drive to collectivize agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s as an oppressor and class enemy.

2. (before the revolution of 1917) a prosperous, ruthless, and stingy merchant or village usurer.

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kulak British  

/ ˈkuːlæk /

noun

1. (in Russia after 1906) a member of the class of peasants who became proprietors of their own farms. After the October Revolution the kulaks opposed collectivization of land, but in 1929 Stalin initiated their liquidation

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Etymology

Origin of kulak

First recorded in 1875–80, kulak is from the Russian word kulák literally, fist

Example Sentences

In the early 1920s, Soviet policy had specifically defined a kulak as someone who hired seasonal farm laborers for an individual farm of twenty-five to forty acres.

From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022

Her father, Apollon, an artist, was the son of a church official, and her mother, Anna, was the daughter of a kulak, or well-to-do peasant.

From New York Times • Aug. 23, 2016

The state took control of kulak land and equipment, and confiscated stores of food and grain.

From Textbooks • Jan. 1, 2012

He was denounced as a kulak in 1930 and was sent to Solovetski Island in the far north.

From Time Magazine Archive

Probably the money wherewith he had set up in business had been wrung out of his fellow-peasants in the profession of a kulak, or "fist," as the people expressively term peasant usurers.

From Russian Rambles by Hapgood, Isabel Florence