1-157-829 - Oxford Science Archive/Heritage Images

'The Fight for the Harvest': sorting of seeds in a Mordva collective farm, 1933. Russian postcard after a painting by Jeroushew. Stalin instigated the policy of collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s in order to increase output. The policy was a disaster, with millions of peasants dying in famines, and Soviet agricultural output did not recover to pre-collectivisation levels until 1940.