A picture promoting the fall of the kulaks
The kulaks were a class of the Russian Empire which was formed by the 1906 Stolypin reform. By 1918, the term "kulak" meant every peasant who had refused to give a percentage of their grain to the Soviet government in Moscow, and Vladimir Lenin called them bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people, and profiteers who fattened on famine; the American equivalent would be a "slumlord". Kulaks were declared class enemies of the poorer peasants under the Soviet Union, and Joseph Stalin persecuted peasants with a few cows and five to six acres more than their neighbors as "kulaks" during his "Dekulakization" campaign of 1929-1932. 1,800,000 kulaks were deported, and 5,000,000 kulaks were either killed by the NKVD or died as a result of the confiscation of their land for collectivization.