They were also able to make excellent use of the Russian character, which Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky described in his novel Believing: "Our doctrine is in reality a denial of honour, and the Russian is most easily dragged down by the open right to dishonour."
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No particular group of the population earned so much hatred from the Bolsheviks as the kulaks. They symbolized everything Lenin hated: Autonomy, private property and independence.
The bestiality with which the Bolsheviks took on an unarmed enemy who was guilty of nothing, who did everything in his power to meet exorbitant demands, and who rose up only when he knew he would either starve to death or be shot, is incomprehensible even with the passage of a century. The collectors of the tribute, accompanied by detachments of Chekists, resorted to murder, beatings, torture, rape of farmers' wives and daughters, burning of villages or fields and hostage-taking. And in June 1921, for example, Tukhachevsky ordered the forests in which the kulaks hid to be cleared of poison gas.
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