The Artificial Famine

In the 1920s the USSR's New Economic Policy (NEP), designed to rehabilitate the postwar economy, helped rejuvenate agriculture in Ukraine. Anxious to attract popular support, the Soviet regime also introduced Ukrainization, a policy that encouraged the use of Ukrainian language and the development of national culture. Beginning in the late 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin brutally reversed both trends. Peasant landholdings were forcibly collectivized and crops were extorted to support industrialization. The result was a …

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