In August 1932, Stalin issued a statewide decree known as “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain,” calling for ten years’ imprisonment or death for anyone caught taking any state-owned property—which, to be clear, was everything—even a handful of grain, rotten potatoes from a field, or fish from a stream. Armed activists patrolled the countryside and sat in watchtowers, shooting, beating, and arresting men, woman, and children as they tried to avoid starvation by eating the very crops they’d sown or gathering food from the land they’d lived on their whole lives.
