Now a kulak was basically a successful farmer that were kicked off their farms due to the new policies that the communists implemented where farms were confiscated and turned into state collectives. In the early 1930s, Stalin saw this program as a success where nearly 2 million kulaks were relocated to Siberia and began to modernize it and turn it into a valuable resource for the nation. Now in February of 1933, the heads of the secret police and the gulag labor camps proposed a repeat of the program, planning to resettle another 2 million settlers to modernize nearly 4,000 square miles of virgin land. But there's one problem. Unlike the early 1930s, by 1933 the Soviet Union was experiencing the effects of the worldwide Great Depression, a brutal famine, and it simply lacked the resources and supplies to support such an endeavor. Still Stalin approved the plan, but he did reduce the number of resettlers to a million. What a nice guy.