Each morning when I read the Kharkov Kommunist I learned about plan-figures reached and over-reached, about competitions between factory shock brigades, awards of the Red Banner, new giant combines in the Urals, and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands, or of some picturesque elder in Usbekistan, always smiling and always learning the alphabet. Not one word about the local famine, epidemics, dying out of whole villages . . .30
