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.
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This study contributes to the theory and practice of how chemical weapons programmers and activity can be evaluated in the context of the international prohibition against their development, production, stockpiling, transfer and use as reflected in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. It presents an application of a hybrid and qualitative variation of Heuer's Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ARC) directed towards arms control verification and intelligence practice using three case studies: the Soviet Union, Iraq, and suspected at al-Qaeda affiliates. This study is comprehensive and multidisciplinary in approach, rather than reductionist. It draws on a very large array of data as they rate to the technical, military and politico-strategic characteristics of chemical warfare, linking a large number of historical detail with conceptual insight into the nature of chemical warfare and chemical weapons arms control.