ABSTRACT
In 1930 and 1931, the Soviet state forcibly exiled almost 2 million peasants in an operation euphemistically labeled “special resettlement.” In early 1930, in practice, this operation was primarily auxiliary to wholesale collectivization, exhibiting in the main “confiscative-repressive” features2 to remove and isolate statedefined enemies (the kulak), to expropriate kulak properties for use in the newly emerging collective farm system (as well as to prevent destruction of such properties), and to intimidate “wavering” peasants into joining collective farms. Later in 1930 and in the years to follow, the state would combine dekulakization with what had been in the 1920s still vague ideas about utilizing what were supposed to become self-sufficient penal populations in colonization, in agricultural expansion, and for the labor needs of the resource-rich but labor-sparse far north and east. The state created out of this amalgam what amounted to a parallel Gulag3 of special resettlement villages, housing first dekulakized peasants and, later, additional contingents of social and ethnic “enemies.”
