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Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition

True

as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers

Bullshit.

The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.

agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union’s life

This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.

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