Modern Farming - Soviet Style

Modern Farming - Soviet Style

Author: Strong, Anna Louise (1885-1970)

Year: 1930

Modern Farming — Soviet Style: The Revolution in the Russian Villiage, by Anna Louise Strong. New York: International Publishers, 1930. International Pamphlets No. 1. Celebration of the glories of collective agriculture in the USSR, one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th Century, by Communist Party fellow-traveler Anna Louise Strong. Strong was in the USSR during the initial phases of the collectivization drive, which lends a tone of first-hand observer to this utterly uncritical and blatantly one-sided apologetic. "When the poor peasant began to cry that he got no benefit from the revolution, and was as poor as ever, the kulak told him the solution was a higher price for grain.... Collectivization was needed in the Soviet Union, first and most simply, as the only means whereby state aid could be efficiently given to poor peasants and farmhands unable to plow their lands. It was needed as the swiftest way to break down the incredibly primitive system of strip farming, and throw all lands into large workable units. It was needed as a social form of control which would give the benefits of large-scale farming, not to a few exploiters but to the entire mass of toili