Mamdani promised to tax the 1%. Then 960,000 people ended up on the list

New York estimated 10,000 luxury second homes in May. By July, the roll had passed 30,000 — and the file it published was wider still.Kulak was not an insult. It was a definition.It had criteria — acreage, livestock, whether you hired hands — and clerks with forms to administer them. When the definition failed to capture enough people, the Soviet state wrote a second one: podkulachnik, the kulak’s helper, which required owning nothing at all. By the end, a man could be destroyed as a wealthy peasant for having the wrong neighbor. I ALREADY FLEW MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST AIRLINE. AMERICA DOESN’T NEED A SEQUELI am not telling you that New York is Cambodia, or that anyone is being sent to Siberia. I am telling you what happens to a definition once a government starts writing one down.When Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) sold New York’s new pied-a-terre tax to the public, it was aimed at global elites holding second homes worth millions. When the legislature passed it in May, officials initially estimated roughly 10,000 potentially affected properties. In late July, the Department of Finance published its initial roll. Bloomberg reported the count at more than 31,000.Three times the estimate, in under three months.Then there is the file itself. The database the city posted — names and addresses included — is far broader than the tax roll, and the New York Post counted more than 960,000 residences and individuals in it. Most of the people who found themselves in a public city database were never the tax’s target at all.They include modest houses in working-class Throggs Neck. They include a row house owned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio. They include Cynthia Nixon, who hosted a fundraiser for Mamdani’s campaign.The city’s defenses are reasonable, and I grant them in full. Publication is required. Appearing in the file does not mean you owe the tax; exemptions exist. Much of it already sat in public property records — when Ken Griffin complained of doxxing, the data he cited was open to anyone. Nobody has been arrested. Nothing here is a purge.That is precisely the point. No one had to intend any of it. The category was written loosely, and on contact with reality, it tripled. Meanwhile, some 17,000 owners have received letters advising that their property may be subject to the surcharge — asking them, in effect, to prove they live where they live.Categories do this. They have always done this. That is the entire argument.They are not monsters The people voting for this are not monsters. They love their children. They want a decent life. Many work two jobs and still cannot cover rent, and they look at a man with three apartments and ask whether that is fair.That question is not stupid. Every honest person asks it.The problem is never the question. The problem is who arrives with the answer.A patient comes to a doctor with headaches. The doctor can order tests and spend months being wrong before being right. Or he can offer to remove the head, and promise — accurately — that the headaches will stop.Movements promising perfect justice always sell the second option, and never in ugly words. They come with equality, fairness, dignity, the defense of the poor. Nobody campaigns on repression. The Bolsheviks did not run on famine; they ran on peace, land, and bread.The beautiful words are step one. Step two is the search for the guilty. Then the sorting of society. Then enemies of the people. Then confiscation, then fear.The names rotate — bourgeois, kulak, wrecker, enemy of the people. By 1953, a state founded on international brotherhood was denouncing “rootless cosmopolitans” and had arrested a group of mostly Jewish doctors over a plot that never existed. The vocabulary changes; the structure does not.The objection you should raise America has a constitution, independent courts, federalism, a free press, and elections that actually remove governments. Russia in 1917 had none of it, nor did Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The mechanism ran to the end there because nothing stood in its way.That is true, and I concede it without reservation.So ask the more useful question: What did the Bolsheviks do when they lost an election?In November 1917, Russia voted for a Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks took roughly a quarter of the vote and lost to the Socialist Revolutionaries. The assembly convened in January 1918 and was dissolved after a single day. The justification was not that they had lost. It was that the assembly did not express the real will of the people, and was therefore not legitimate.Now read the platform the Democratic Socialists of America published this month. Note the term: these are democratic socialists, not social democrats. Denmark is not on offer. The document calls for drafting a new constitution, abolishing the Senate, and replacing the president and the Supreme Court with figures chosen by Congress. By July 27, the Associated Press was reporting it as fodder for Republican attacks heading into the midterm elections.I am not claiming the Senate is about to be abolished. Someone will tell you it would take a constitutional amendment and is therefore fantasy, and about the procedure, they are right.But people do not write down what they do not want. A platform states what a movement would do if the obstacle was not there. The obstacle is still there. The list of which obstacles should come down has already been written, published, and defended on television.That is not the outcome. That is the justification — and the justification always arrives first.What I actually know I did not choose the kulak as an example at random.On the night of Feb. 25, 1951, state security troops woke my grandfather in the village of Bebnisi, in Soviet Georgia. He was the chief engineer of the district tractor station, a former prisoner of war who had escaped a German camp, reached the partisans, and fought on until 1945. Beside his name on the deportation list stood two words: prisoner of war, and kulak. There was no trial and no hearing. The evidence of his wealth was a house he had built himself out of basalt stone. It is still standing. The family was sealed into a freight car and left on the Kazakh Steppe, where they dug a pit in the ground and lived in it.Decades later, vetted for Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, I read his file myself: fully exonerated, all charges groundless.I have told that story in full elsewhere and will not retell it here. I raise it for one reason. Nobody in 1951 wrote “destroy this man” beside my grandfather’s name. They wrote a category, and the category did the rest.Karl Popper needed a single sentence for this, in a book written in wartime exile: The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.So I do not claim to know how this ends. I know what a beginning looks like.MAMDANI’S SOCIALISTS WROTE A NEW PLATFORM. I’VE READ IT BEFORE — IN RUSSIANAnd I know what a list does. New York initially estimated 10,000 in May and published an initial roll above 30,000 in July — and posted a file so much wider than the roll that most of the people in it were never the target. Under three months. No malice required. No conspiracy necessary.The category always grows. It has never once shrunk.Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior Georgian counterintelligence officer, member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008-2012, and now an independent geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist.