You stand convicted by your own words. This exerpt is an excellent example, no famines, no mass murder, no gulag, no deportations. And most especially, no failure to produce enough to adequately feed the Soviet people.
Fred
From: "Abe Sokolov" abesokolov@hotmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:37:19 +0000 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Can we ban 172 now? And VV too! (in response to Fred Bauder)
==Agriculture==
[[Agriculture]] was organized into a system of state and collective farms. Organized on a large scale and highly mechanized, the Soviet Union was one of the world's leading producers of cereals, although bad harvests (as in [[1972]] and [[1975]]) necessitated imports and slowed the economy. The [[1976]]-[[1980]] five-year plan shifted resources to agriculture, and [[1978]] saw a record harvest. [[Cotton]], [[sugar beet]]s, [[potato]]es, and [[flax]] were also major crops.
Despite immense land resources, extensive machinery and chemical industries, and a large rural work force, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive, hampered in many areas by the [[climate]] (only 10 percent of the Soviet Union's land was arable), and poor worker [[productivity]].
Conditions were best in the temperate black-earth belt stretching from the Ukraine through southern [[Russia]] into the west spanning the extreme southern portions of [[Siberia]].
Stalin established the USSR's system of state and collective farms when he moved to replaced the NEP with collective farming in 1928, which grouped peasants into collective farms (''[[kolkhoz]]es'') and state farms (''[[sovkhoz]]es'').