An excellent new book - and review - About the 1st large-scale deportation under Stalin Of the Kulak's (wealthy peasant farmers) to make way for collectivisation.....in 1929-1930s. This is also of relevance to GRs. http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/05/18/105.h tml Killing Fields Stalin's deportation of the hundreds of thousands of peasants who were labeled class enemies was as shoddily planned as it was merciless, a new book by Lynne Viola reveals. By Catherine Merridale Published: May 18, 2007 The story that Lynne Viola has set out to tell in "The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements" may seem familiar enough. Her subject is the fate of the so-called "kulaks," the peasants designated as class enemies on account of their supposed wealth or bourgeois political attitudes. These unfortunate people -- hundreds of thousands of them -- were forcibly driven from their homes and farms between 1929 and 1931 as part of the campaign of agricultural collectivization. Some were executed more or less immediately, but the majority were herded into crowded rail cars heading north and east. Two decades after glasnost, there is little that we do not know about the human cost of Soviet development. Piles of evidence already testify to the cruelty and also the counter-productivity of Soviet policy in the 1930s. Anne Applebaum's comprehensive study of the gulag, drawing on newly opened archives, leaves little to the imagination when it comes to the brutality of Josef Stalin's camps. Somewhere in the middle of this, however, the kulaks' fate has been overlooked. That is, accounts of collectivization mention their deportation, and studies of the gulag (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's included) offer a glimpse of suffering, but there have been few systematic studies of these former peasants' fate in exile. Viola's book sets out from here, and her story adds considerably to our understanding of the dismal workings of Stalin's regime.