Collectivization and famine behind Soviet industrialization

Lloyd Clark's Kursk traces Soviet military industry back to the coercion imposed on the countryside. Collectivization brought peasant farms under greater state control and imposed quotas that families feared would consume even the food they kept for themselves. Production fell as requisitioning for the cities and grain exports intensified the famine. The book gives a figure of seven million deaths, including one in eight Ukrainians, and quotes Stalin insisting that industrialization take precedence.