Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.15
