Abstract
The paper is devoted to the study of social aspects of political repressions in the USSR.On the example of the largest punitive campaign of the Great Terror, the so-called Kulak Operation, carried out by Order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 00447, an attempt was made to analyze mass repression through a "social" or "collective" portrait of the victims.Kazakhstan was chosen as a region where modernization processes proceeded at a faster pace and had a pronounced industrial, albeit raw material industries, character.Forced labor was widely used in the Republic.The emphasis in the analysis of the "Kulak" Operation was placed on the study of repression against persons employed in the industrial sector that, in fact, was in a conflict with the modernization paradigm.The materials of extrajudicial instances ("Kulak" troikas) and the reporting of the NKVD of the Kazakh SSR became the sources for this study.It was found that the proportion of those repressed from the industrial sectors of the economy turned out to be very significant and can be estimated in the range of 8-12% of the total number of victims of the "Kulak".Operation in the Republic, and is currently estimated at some 26,000 people.Based on the example of repressions against workers, it is shown that the large-scale social cleansing campaign also affected that part of the population that "fitted" into the socialist society.Carrying out repressions against "those class related", the authorities moved away from the model of the "proletarian" and "workers' and peasants' state".It is concluded that through repression, the authorities tried to relieve themselves of responsibility for failures and economic difficulties.