Anne Appelbaum wrote about kulaks in her book about Joseph Stalin’s war on Ukraine. The first sentence in her quotation of a memoir about the Russian Revolution says it all:
What Dolot had witnessed was the beginning of “dekulakization”–the ugly, bureaucratic term that was shorthand for the “elimination of the kulaks as a class.” But who was a kulak? As noted, this term was not traditional everywhere in the USSR, and certainly not in Ukraine. Although widely used in newspapers, by agitators and by authorities of all kinds since the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, it had always been vague and ill-defined. In her memoir of the Russian Revolution, Ekaterina Olitskaia noted that in the civil[-]war era:
Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak.
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, p 123
Americans not vaccinated for COVID-19 are the USA’s kulaks to Vox correspondent Ian Millhiser:
Who will decide what Millhiser means by “legitimate” as a religious or medical reason to be unvaccinated? Appelbaum’s book covers a similar question vis-à-vis kulaks:
As the state demands to “eliminate the kulaks as a class” became a priority, Ukrainian authorities felt the need to find a better definition. In August 1929 the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree identifying the “symptoms” of kulak farms….
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, p 123