workers had to work longer under Stalin than when they were ruled by the tsars. "Depending on the industry, they worked between forty-eight and sixty hours a week, Sundays included . . ." (Marrin 103). Once the industrial Five Year Plans started to roll, Stalin decided to make some agricultural changes to support the industrialization. In April, 1928, Stalin presented the draft of a new land law. Although the draft failed to become a law, it showed a couple of Stalin's objectives. One was the rapid and forcible collectivization of the peasants in order to industrialize the country quickly. The other was the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. Kulaks were classified as, "Those peasants who were either industrious, or more prosperous than their neighbors, or simply those who were not enthusiastic about the policies of the communist party . . ." (Dmytryshyn 167). Collectivization was the forcible consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises. It was suppose to help Russian agriculture and support the quickly industrializing country (McKay 928; Dmytryshyn 167). Soviet writer, Lyudmila Saraskina believed that, "Collectivization was a bloody, terrible, and monstrous means of the seizure of absolute power, because the free peasant and master of the land, the farmer, constituted one of the main obstacles on the path to the absolute feudal power that Stalin really wanted . . ." (Lewis 65). The kulaks were the well off peasants that opposed collectivization any way they could. The way Stalin dealt with them was to first turn the bedniaks or poor peasants against them offering the bedniaks the kulaks castles and machinery. Then, Stalin had the rest of the kulaks either killed or exiled to the northern or eastern regions of the country. The death toll recorded in the anti-kulak campaign is between three and ten million killed (Treadgold 268; Dmytryshyn 168; Lewis 63). Many peasants killed their c...
