Rural exploiters: the boundaries of social space (the criteria of identification in the legislation at the end of 1920-s)

On the basis of new sources, mainly, the documents of the Peoples Commissariats of Finance of the USSR and RSFSR, the criteria of identification of rural exploiters in the legislation of 1928-1929 are analyzed for the first time in Russian literature. The author reconsiders the firmly established viewpoint on uncertainty of social and economic signs of the kulaks farms formulated in the legislation of 1929 under which it was possible to consider almost any farm as the kulaks one. The conclusion is drawn that only after cancellation in the autumn of 1929 in confidential instructions of the Center of the restrictions formulated earlier in the legislation in treatment of signs of rural exploiters, "the legal" base for expansion of volume of social group of "kulaks" at the expense of inclusion in it of the increasing number of the peasants declared as the "enemies of the Soviet power" has been formed.