- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Soviet Gardening Tips

In Reply to: Reassessing the U.S.S.R. posted by Barry Stoller on October 01, 1999 at 11:01:25:

[N]or could it have been won without the collectivization of large numbers of farms... 'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us'---so Stalin had spoken exactly ten years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia.

4. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, 1966 edition, p. 550.

I read Orlando Fige's book about this a while back. Apparently he has a number of different takes on the whole situation.

What I find interesting is that in his book, he basically states that most Russian farming communities were communal anyways and that what Lenin and Co. were doing was basically forcing a management theory down the throats of the peasants (i.e., forced collectivization). I recommend reading it.

• Sovietology for Dummies

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