In 1928, the Soviet Union was at the start of its first five-year plan to pursue an accelerated program of industrialization that drew many people to the cities and increased bread shortages. Bad weather and Stalin’s rural policies made the shortages far worse. Better-off and less-cooperative peasants were denounced as “kulaks,” and at the outset of 1929, Stalin launched a swift and brutal “dekulakization” rampage to destroy members of this fluid category. Immense numbers of peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were executed, imprisoned, or shipped off to Siberia and other remote places. The
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