Overview
In Hammer, Sickle, and Soil, Jonathan Daly tells the harrowing story of Stalin's transformation of millions of family farms throughout the USSR into 250,000 collective farms during the period from 1929 to 1933. History's biggest experiment in social engineering at the time and the first example of the complete conquest of the bulk of a population by its rulers, the policy was above all intended to bring to Russia Marx's promised bright future of socialism. In the process, however, it caused widespread peasant unrest, massive relocations, and ultimately led to millions dying in the famine of 1932–33. Drawing on scholarly studies and primary-source collections published since the opening of the Soviet archives three decades ago, now, for the first time, this volume offers an accessible and accurate narrative for the general reader. The book is illustrated with propaganda posters from the period that graphically portray the drama and trauma of the revolution in Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In chilling detail the author describes how the havoc and destruction wrought in the countryside sowed the seeds of destruction of the entire Soviet experiment.Reviews
'In this invaluable primer, Jonathan Daly brings together the most influential arguments from the last half century of anglophone scholarship on the perennial question: what led to the rise of the West? Students will get reliable summaries of the diverse views of more than a dozen prominent historians (and historical sociologists) - and in prose often more readable than the original texts.' Professor John McNeill, Georgetown University, USA (endorsement for Historians Debate the Rise of the West) "Unique, combining great scope (from prehistory to the twentieth century) and a single, compelling, authorial voice [...] His comparisons to other continents and civilizations are not simply bullet points but near-parallel narrative lines. […] Daly deepens our understanding of how-for good or ill-the west rose to dominance." – Colloquy (endorsement of The Rise of Western Power)Author Biography
Jonathan Daly is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of numerous books, including Historians Debate the Rise of the West (2015).
