Everybody understood, at some level, that collectivization was itself the source of the new shortages. Stalin himself had received reports explaining exactly what was wrong with the collective farms, describing their inefficiency in great detail. One official from the Central Black Earth province even wrote him a daring defence of private property: “How to explain this enormous drop in collective farm production? It’s impossible to explain it, except to say that the material interest in and responsibility for the losses, and for the low quality of work, don’t affect each individual collective
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