"Enrich yourselves!" the Bolsheviks told Russia's peasants in the rosy first dawn of the Revolution, when the large estates were divided up with Marxist equality. The peasants enriched themselves, but equality did not last long. So Stalin drove the peasants into state collective farms, or kolkhozes.
The old Soviet pattern now seems to be at work in China. In 1946, the peasants in Shansi province, in the northwest, were among the first in China to be violently communized: landlords were liquidated and everything was divided equally, not only the land but hoes and scythes. Even farm animals were slaughtered so...
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