What was up with all the power struggles in the soviet government?

You are wrong.

tankie go away

The invention of the concept of a "subkulak". Zizek talks about it here, the definition of what was a "kulak" lost any objective meaning and analysis

lacan.com/zizgorgias.htm

Though I think you should stop reading Richard Pipes, an avowed anti-communist. There are better sources to investigate the fucked up Stalinist policies.

We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude. Subkulak was thus

a term without any real social content even by Stalinist standards, but merely rather unconvincingly masquerading as such. As was officially stated, 'by kulak we mean the carrier of certain political tendencies which are most frequently discernible in the subkulak, male and female.' By this means, any peasant whatever was liable to dekulakisation; and the subkulak notion was widely employed, enlarging the category of victims greatly beyond the official estimate of kulaks proper even at its most strained. [14]

No wonder that the official ideologists and economists finally renounced the very effort to provide an "objective" definition of kulak: "The grounds given in one Soviet comment are that 'the old attitudes of a kulak have almost disappeared, and the new ones do not lend themselves to recognition.'" [15] The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became the matter of a complex "hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying one's "true political attitudes" hidden beneath deceiving public proclamations, so that Pravda had to concede that "even the best activists often cannot spot the kulak." [16]

What all this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the "subjective" and "objective" dimension: subkulak no longer designates an "objective" social category; it designates the point at which objective social analysis breaks down and subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the "objective" order - in Lacanese, subkulak is the point of subjectivization of the "objective" chain poor peasant - middle peasant - kulak. It is not an "objective" sub-category (or sub-division) of the class of kulaks, but simply the name for the kulak subjective political attitude - this accounts for the paradox that, although it appears as a subdivision of the class of kulaks, subkulaks is a species that overflows its own genus (that of kulaks), since subkulaks are also to be found among middle and even poor farmers. In short, subkulak names political division as such, the Enemy whose presence traverses the ENTIRE social body of peasants, which is why he can be found everywhere, in all three peasant classes. This brings us back to the procedure of Stalinist dieresis: subkulak names the excessive element that traverses all classes, the outgrowth which has to be eliminated.

nice meme bro!

""wut""

"wut"

sage ´´sage´´

what the fuck

he

k

has

Anti-Stalinist intellectual at work, le I don't like your sources.