What did collectivization mean for the countryside?
I don’t know that in 1927 there was any clear notion about the pace of collectivization and the agony and turmoil that might result from it, but I do think that a combination of two factors became very important in Ukraine in 1927. One was a feeling that the regime had to back away from what it was beginning to read as the excesses of Ukrainianization. The second was the decision to introduce a radically different form of agriculture, and there would be no part of the Soviet Union where the impact of that would be as great as in Ukraine because the Ukrainians were so much a part of the countryside. In attacking the traditional forms of agriculture the regime was moving to a major attack on the Ukrainians. Q: At about the same time the regime began to mount an attack against the intelligentsia. I have in mind the destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, the trial of the League for the Liberation of Ukraine. All this gradually built up into a formal attack on the cultural elite
