Prompted by whatever had provoked his note, Stalin immediately withdrew the millet and other food aid to Ukraine. He also demanded that the Ukrainian Communist Party maintain its policy of confiscating tractors and other equipment from underperforming farms. He did not want any generous gestures to be misinterpreted as an independent action of the Ukrainian leadership, and he certainly didn’t want them to be seen as a “demonstration against Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party.”64 He was deeply concerned about the Ukrainian party’s reliability. Using language that illustrates how far the
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