Two and a half weeks later the Soviet government issued another order that seems, at first glance, to have been intended to soften the blow. In an oddly worded statement, the Council of Ministers denounced the irregular methods of food collection that had been used all across the country—the plans, the plan failures, the supplementary plans—and called, instead, for peasants to pay a tax, in the form of a fixed percentage of their production. But there was one caveat: the tax was to take effect only in the summer of 1933. Until then the deadly requisitions would continue.29 In other words,
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