Collectivisation of agriculture in Uzbekistan and the deportation of “kulaks”
The second stage of the land and water reform of 1925–1929 (begun by decrees of the Uzbek CEC of 2 December 1925) aimed to limit large landholding: farms with 40 desyatinas or more of irrigated land in Fergana and 50 in Tashkent and Samarkand were to be liquidated and their land given to peasants. According to the textbook about 5,000 wealthy farms were liquidated and over 23,000 well-off farms lost “surplus” land. On 17 February 1930 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan decided on collectivisation and the liquidation of “kulak” farms; those who did not join a kolkhoz were threatened with loss of water and goods, taxes and deportation, and in many districts the process took only weeks. Officially by 1932, 75 percent of peasant households were in kolkhozes and sovkhozes, and individual farms were eliminated altogether in 1939. The property of those registered as kulaks was confiscated, and families were deported to Ukraine, Siberia, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and elsewhere or placed in 17 forced-labour settlements inside the republic; the textbook reports that in August 1931 3,828 farms were liquidated and 3,871 families deported. Grain procurement was carried out under harsh compulsion, livestock was slaughtered en masse, many families abandoned their homes, protests were recorded in March 1930, and the return of survivors from exile stretched over 1934–1956.
Cause-and-effect chain: students build the chain “decision → compulsion → protest → deportation/repression” from cards and write one piece of evidence for each link.