The Kulaks and Stalinist Redistribution

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joseph Stalin initiated a campaign against the so-called kulaks—peasants accused of being wealthier than their neighbors. The label itself was fluid; it could encompass anyone who owned a few more cows or harvested a little more grain than the village average. The state cast these modestly prosperous farmers as class enemies. Their land, tools, and homes were seized in the name of “social justice,” and millions were deported, starved, or executed in the process.

The policy was justified as necessary to collectivize agriculture, but its deeper logic was moral leveling. Those who rose above their station—even by diligence and thrift—were portrayed as oppressors of the collective good. Redistribution was not a gentle transfer of resources; it was the annihilation of the independent producer in order to homogenize society under centralized control.

Andru Volinsky and Redistributive Politics in New Hampshire

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Andru Volinsky, a New Hampshire politician and attorney best known for his involvement in the Claremont school funding lawsuits, has advanced a vision of equity through aggressive redistribution. His framework asserts that “fairness” requires pooling resources at the state level and reallocating them to achieve educational parity across towns.

Unlike the kulaks, no one is being deported to Siberia, but the ethical principle is familiar: local productivity is delegitimized if it produces unequal outcomes. Communities that have cultivated wealth through careful planning, industry, or tax base advantages are cast as morally suspect if they resist redistribution. In Volinsky’s rhetoric, as in Stalin’s, inequality itself is treated as a form of exploitation, regardless of its origins.

Ethical Equivalence: The Logic of Redistribution

To compare the liquidation of the kulaks with Volinsky’s redistributive politics is not to equate the scale of their consequences. Stalin left corpses; Volinsky leaves higher tax bills. Yet ethics is not only about outcomes; it is about principles.

Both Stalin and Volinsky operate from the same moral premise:

• That prosperity, if unevenly distributed, is inherently unjust.
  
• That state coercion is justified to erase these differences.
  
• That individuals or communities who resist redistribution become moral obstacles to be overcome.
  

The difference is one of magnitude, not logic. Stalin had the full machinery of a totalitarian state, while Volinsky has legislative tools and judicial mandates. However, in both cases, what begins as rhetoric about “fairness” ultimately culminates in stripping some of their resources for the supposed benefit of others.

The Lesson

History shows that once the state assumes the right to redefine fairness in terms of redistribution, it rarely respects limits. What starts as taxation can become confiscation; what begins as vilification can end in liquidation. The kulaks’ tragedy warns us that redistribution justified on ethical grounds has a dangerous internal logic, one that dehumanizes the productive and sanctifies envy.

When New Hampshire debates school funding formulas today, the stakes are not famine and exile—but the underlying moral argument deserves scrutiny. To conflate inequality with injustice is to walk, however politely, on the same path that once led to collectivization.