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(historical) A prosperouspeasant in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, who owned land and could hire workers.
2002 Sep, Christopher Hitchens, “Martin Amis: Lightness at Midnight”, in The Atlantic:
The “internal organs,” as the CHEKA and the GPU and the KGB used to style themselves, were asked to police the mind for heresy as much as to torture kulaks to relinquish the food they withheld from the cities.
2015 February 6, Nick Gillespie, “To the Barricades, Brooklyn Yuppies!”, in The Dailey Beast, retrieved 20150206:
We are the “upper middle class”, the new kulaks whose antisocial self-interest and lack of submission to the aims of the revolutionary vanguard must be extinguished.
Usage notes
During Soviet state collectivization of farming in the 1920s and 1930s the label kulak, implying “tight-fisted”, was applied pejoratively to land-owning peasants in general.