Big Bob wrote:What about the 20,000,000 people who disagreed with Stalin who were quietly removed from the scene?
To understand the class struggle that took place in the USSR, it is necessary to try to have a more realistic image of the Russian Kulak.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a specialist on Russian peasant life spoke as follows:
" Every village commune has always three or four regular kulaks, as also half a dozen or more smaller fry of the same kidney...They want neither skill nor industry, only promptitude to turn to their own profit, the needs, the sorrows, the sufferings and misfortunes of others.
" The distinctive characteristic of this class...is the hard unflinching cruelty of a thoroughly educated man who has made his way from poverty to wealth, and has come to consider money- making, by whatever means, as the only pursuit to which a rational being should devote himself"
E. J. Dillon, from the USA, who had a profound knowledge of old Russia wrote:
" And of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall so malignant and odious as the Russian kulak".
If the kulaks, who represented already 5 per cent of the peasantry, had succeeded in extending their economic base and definitively imposing themselves as the dominant force in the countryside, the socialist power in the cities would not have been able to maintain itself, faced with this encirclement of bourgeoisie forces.
82 per cent of the Soviet population was peasant. If the Bolshevik party had no longer succeeded in feeding the workers at relatively low prices, the very basis of working class power would have been threatened.
Oh, but I will give you that you changed the ' to an ". 
