The Artificial Famine
In the 1920s the USSR's New Economic Policy (NEP), designed to rehabilitate the postwar economy, helped rejuvenate agriculture in Ukraine. Anxious to attract popular support, the Soviet regime also introduced Ukrainization, a policy that encouraged the use of Ukrainian language and the development of national culture. Beginning in the late 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin brutally reversed both trends. Peasant landholdings were forcibly collectivized and crops were extorted to support industrialization. The result was a terrible famine in 1932 and 1933 in which an estimated 5 million to 14 million Ukrainians perished. At this catastrophic cost, industrial production was pushed to record-breaking levels; in 1940 it was more than seven times as high as in 1913. In the mid-1930s Stalin initiated mass arrests and executions of his opponents, both real and imagined, resulting in the devastation of Ukraine's intelligentsia by the end of the decade. Although many people still argue that this famine was caused by drought or pestilence, it was by the hand of man that so many people were sentenced to death by starvation. Anyone who died was consumed, among with dogs, cats and other feral animals that lived in and among the villages in U
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1522
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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