This Soviet propaganda poster reads: "We will smite the kulak who agitates for reducing cultivated acreage".
http://soviethistory.org/images/Large/1929/pi170.jpg

First of all, we need to differentiate the term KULAK from the other similar GULAG, which is also related to this issue.

The Kulaks were a prosperous peasant working class from the Russian countryside. They worked in collective farms called Kolkhoz, they worked for a profit share and not for the state or someone else. The Kolkhoz farms were property of groups of cooperating farmers, they had no guarantee for their income. Kolkhoz is an abbreviation of Kollektivnoe Khozyaistvo (Collective household). Stalin proceeded to destroy them first by restricting the exploiting proclivities of the Kulaks later by eliminating the whole Kulaks as a class.

The Gulag is a Russian acronym which means: Glavnoie Upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration for Corrective Labour Camps) in plain words, basic forced labor concentration camps. The Soviet state prison system during the communist era.

During his reign of terror between the late 1920´s and early 50´s, Josef Stalin´s communist regime eliminated no less than 15 million people and also sent a similar number to the Gulag hard labor camps in Siberia. It was called the "Stalinist Purges". Nothing less than a paranoid and systematic cleaning of all the military ranks in the armed forces and citizens of the Soviet society that were accused by the regime suspected of being enemies of the communist ideals.

Anybody was vulnerable to accusations like being a traitor to the cause and enemy of the Soviet state. Probably as many Soviet people were killed during his reign of terror as that perished during World War II at the hands of the Nazis. That´s one of the reasons for the 40 million deaths figure. Between 15 to 20 million deaths ocurred during the purges of the 30's and later another 20 million deaths during World War II.

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These bloodthirsty phases of Stalin's career began in the late 1920s after he had successfully isolated his political rivals and emerged as undisputed master of the Soviet Union. He used coercion and terror to mobilize the working population to fulfill his grandiose five-year plans for industrializing the economically backward USSR.

Stalin pursued an especially uncompromising policy towards the Soviet peasantry. He aimed at nothing less than depriving peasants of their land, herding them into state-run collective farms, and empowering the state to seize all their agricultural produce.

Standing in the way of this wholesale expropriation, however, were millions of peasant smallholders called Kulaks. During 1930-31 Stalin's drastic solution was to call for the "liquidation of the Kulaks as a class". This was probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by any state against its own citizens. Millions who escaped death in this way were rounded up, bundled into cattle trucks and deported to the notorious Gulag slave labour camps in Siberia or the Arctic where many perished.

In collectivizing agriculture, Stalin met particular fierce resistance from Ukrainians, whose large population and sense of nationhood, he feared, could also prove a threat to Moscow's rule. During 1932-33 Stalin used unprecedented means to bring Ukraine to heel. He had all of Ukraine's grain confiscated and her borders sealed so that no person could leave and no food could enter the country. In what amounted to the first deliberately man-made famine in history, Stalin turned Ukraine, once the great breadbasket of Europe, into a vast wasteland. Millions died.

After the collectivization-terror, Stalin sought to eliminate from the upper echelons of Soviet society anybody who could conceivably pose a threat to his rule. He unleashed a political witch-hunt directed against Communist Party members who had been prominent during the time of his predecessor, Lenin.

During 1934-37 Stalin's Purges spread to every level of the military and Soviet society. Citizens were encouraged to denounce neighbors and workmates as spies or saboteurs. Regional police chiefs frantically vied with each other to fulfill or over-fulfill their arrest quotas of alleged "enemies of the people", or else faced being shot themselves.

To conceal the huge gap of missing citizens, a "revised" census was published in 1939, with grossly inflated population figures. But even this revealed that roughly 10% of the Soviet population was statistically missing. Some 15 million victims of Stalin's reign of terror.
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Farmers of the Kolkhozes protest against the prosperous Kulak peasants during 1930. This resulted in widespread famines.
http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/images/09context/kolchoze.jpg

Deportation current of the massive Kulak internal exile during the early 1930´s in the USSR.
https://segueuserfiles.middlebury.edu/Geog0214a-1-G2/Map-1.jpg
Source(s):
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2003jun28_cover.html

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