RUSSIA: Dismantling the Fortresses

One of the human upheavals vast enough to change the physical look of a large part of the earth's surface was the collectivizing of Soviet agriculture. One hundred and eight million Russian peasants were forcibly torn from the traditional checkerboard of their individual farms and resettled in a new pattern of huddled hamlets dotting the forest-wall-to-forest-wall carpeting of huge collectively tilled fields. This battle for collectivization, Stalin told Churchill, was harder to win than the war against Hitler, and he killed or starved to death an estimated 6,000,000 Russians in winning...

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