Soviet Union. Stalin declared that the Soviet state must “liquidate the kulaks as a social class.” He also stated that two years should be sufficient. Kulaks constituted 3-5% of the rural population. The classification of “kulak” often led to the deportation of the most hardworking peasants or those who had managed to save enough to buy a draft horse. Five million kulaks were expelled from their homes by 1933. As many as thirty thousand heads of families were philatelicized. The status of kulak, clearly an entirely invented inter-subjective category, would also be passed down to subsequent generations.
