I've seen comments where people claim that kulaks during the Holodomor "deserved it" or "had it coming", usually saying it was because kulaks hoarded grain and possibly destroyed it rather than turn it over for collectivization. Is such a claim rooted in truth? Were there documented cases of kulaks hoarding or burning grain that were later applied to kulaks as a whole? Was the claim ever officially propagated by the Soviet government or did it originate from another source?
I'm referring to kulaks in terms of both the original definition (private citizens who gained large amounts of farmland during Stolypin's reforms) and the later expansion of the definition to include slightly-wealthier farmers and people who resisted (in Robert Conquest's words, any peasant farmers "with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors").
I found a similar question on this subreddit, but it didn't have any replies.
I'm reading a Stalin biography (this one - issued by "Christian Family" magazine, and while the author has been a communist in the past, it's highly critical of Stalin. And, to answer your question, yes, kulaks did hoarded grain. For a period, during the NEP, the official policy was to let peasants "enrich themselves", to gain consensus among the large masses of Soviet peasants. Later on, the official policy reversed to "we should get over the 50-100 years of technological gap between USSR and the Capitalist World", EDIT therefore favoring Industry over Agriculture. To do so, USSR needed to buy crops from peasants at lower prices to export them; kulaks, the richest and most enteprising of the peasants class, didn't like this "change of mind" from the government: so they refused to sell and/or destroyed the vegetables and the cattle. Then, the government began to forcefully confiscate lands and goods to these rich peasants EDIT: which led to dekulakization and Holodomor
At least, this is what I understood, I'll be glad if someone wants to correct me.
