Red Bread

First published in 1931 and long out of print, "Red Bread" is Russian-born journalist Maurice Hindus's account of his return to his native village in 1929-30 to see for himself how Stalin's collectivization campaign was transforming the lives of the peasants among whom he had grown up in prerevolutionary times. This warm and human narrative conveys in personal and immediate terms his peasant neighbors' responses to being forced out of a centuries-old way of life and into the unfamiliar social setting and industrialized large-scale agriculture of the kolkhoz. Convinced that collectivized farming would bring Russian agriculture and the Russian peasant into the modern age, Hindus was nonetheless deeply troubled by the huge social cost and personal suffering inflicted by Stalin's ruthless campaign. "Red Bread" contributes an invaluable grassroots perspective on the era's dynamism and despair to the current discussion of the Soviet historical experience in the Soviet Union and the West. Maurice Hindus (1891-1969) emigrated to America in 1905. As a writer, lecturer, and war correspondent, he made many trips to Russia during the 1920's, thirties, and forties. Among his best-known books about Russia are "Broken Earth" and "Humanity Uprooted".