Enforced collectivisation of farming under Stalin was supposed to improve yields by 20 per cent as a result of increased crop planting and the use of the latest agricultural technologies. The lack of co-operation from a peasantry resistant both to new methods and to coercion, coupled with requisitioning and repression, created circumstances that resulted in famine across Ukraine and southern Russia which claimed astonishing numbers of lives – perhaps as many as 8 million in 1932–3; life expectancy for men born in Ukraine in 1932 was thirty; for those born in 1933–5, it was just five.[44] The
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