The Kulaks

The communist government’s fight against 'kulaks', the most capable people in the rural world, was a fight against performance itself.

Steliu Lambru, 17.08.2026, 12:30

In the vocabulary used by the communist regime to label its adversaries, the word “chiabur” (kulak) had a particularly notable career. Entering the Romanian language from Turkish, its form appears to be “kibār,” originating from Arabic, where it is the plural form of “great,” “important,” “senior,” “learned.” Through an aggressive ideological reinterpretation, the term became pejorative and was used against peasants who opposed the economic policies of the communist government imposed by the Soviet Union on March 6, 1945. Traditionally, the so called kulaks represented the village elite, although they were not called that before the communists arrived. However, ideology forced a new socio economic meaning onto the term and included within it middle peasants, those with small property, and rural merchants. Kulaks were also “enemies of the people,” using another famous expression from the 1950s, one with a much broader application. In the arsenal of communist accusations, kulaks were traitors because they did not pay their quotas to the state, hid food during the famine years, were speculators, and generally conspired. The communist government’s fight against the most capable people in the rural world was a fight against performance itself.

In the 1990s, the Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation carried out a project of interviews in rural communities about Sovietization, and outlining the figure of the kulak was an important part of it. Ion Agrigoroaiei, a historian from Iași, recalled in 1995 what it meant, in the 1950s, to not have a “good file” or to be the child of a kulak: “It was the period when the sons of kulaks were being hunted. Some people were considered kulaks because they had a still for making brandy and paid someone to help them produce alcohol. Others were the sons of priests who suffered both during university and at job placement. Their access to higher education was cut off, for example. This restriction was maintained for years. I had a colleague, now a distinguished Romanian teacher at the Boarding High School. He even earned his doctorate, but he had to go teach in the countryside because his file wasn’t what they wanted.”

Engineer Vlad Nisipeanu had been a communist activist since the illegal period, before 1945. In this capacity, he witnessed the collectivization campaign in the villages and saw how kulaks were “manufactured.” In 1999, he acknowledged the absurdity of the situations he had witnessed: “Some people would ask: What kind of kulak am I? What does kulak even mean? They were told: a kulak is a wealthy man. The man would ask again: But shouldn’t you rely on the wealthy peasant? You rely on the one who doesn’t work, who is poor because he doesn’t work? Some were truly poor, they had nothing. But others were poor because they were lazy. Those who worked were very easily labeled kulaks, and it was terrifying to be put on the kulak list. What did that mean? Large quotas had to be delivered to the state for free: wool, milk, meat, wheat, corn. And if you didn’t deliver according to their lists, they confiscated everything. And if you didn’t even have land for them to take, they put you in jail. And so, some innocent people were made kulaks. What was held against them? That they had a brandy still. And what was so terrible about having a brandy still? It was nonsense, stupidity. But then you were a kulak, an exploiter. Rarely, in each commune, maybe one or two people had a threshing machine. That one was a big capitalist. They took his machine, confiscated it, and destroyed it. Or the kulak was the one who owned a mill. There was one mill for every two or three villages. They took the mill from him too.”

Petre Gherman from Cobadin, Constanța County, was what was called a kulak. In 1999, Gherman explained how he became labeled a kulak and how ordinary people reinforced the stigma that isolated him from the rest of the community: “I wasn’t in the collective farm because they classified me as a kulak, God help me! One man made me a kulak, his name was Bucur. He was a thug from the village, and the regime took him and attached him to the Town Hall. He considered himself a party activist, but his mission was to collect quotas. He went around saying about each person: this one did that, the other one did something else. At a meeting he said about me: We must make him a kulak. Another one, Bozdoc, helped him do this. And in the end they made me a kulak. They told me when they came from the village center after the meeting: Hey, do you know they made you a kulak? How could they make me one? I asked. They answered: Just like that, they made you a kulak because you used to trade, you bought and sold. After that, when I walked through the village and someone saw me, they’d shout: How are you, kulak? I would look at him and ask: Why do you call me that? Well, if they made you a kulak, I have to call you a kulak, they would reply.”

The kulaks were the people of Romanian villages before 1945 who built things. They worked their land, built houses and roads, founded families, created businesses, paid taxes, and shed blood for the defense and making of Romania in the two world wars. For all this, they were punished by the criminal communist regime that claimed, above all else, to be humanist. (EE)