People didn’t want to enter these collective farms at all, but they were forced to. They took everything – land, grain, ploughs, animals. And as if that weren’t enough they took the bread out of the house. My grandfather was a blacksmith; he resisted for three years. They took his horses, his smith’s shop, they banged with hammers on the walls to see if he had hidden any grain. They even took the seedcorn for the next year. A barn or a stable was a symbol of wealth. If you had a metal roof on your house, you were considered a kulak, and sent away to the North. You know Tykhon’s house over the
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