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- what do you call it - shchi with cabbage.'
    The official history claims that people 'came from all over the Union, many answering the call of the Party and the Komsomol [the Communist Youth League]. These were people who were passionately committed to their task, giving it all their strength, true enthusiasts. They formed the basic backbone of the building, the front line of the active fighters for the creation of a sturdy foundation for the socialist economy.'
    The reality was different. Most of the peasants who flocked to the site were starving refugees from a war the fledgling Soviet state had unleashed against its own people.
    'The Party is justified in shifting from a policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks [prosperous peasants] to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class,' read the Central Committee's decree of 5 January 1930. The Wannsee memorandum of 1942 which mapped out the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem is more famous - but the Soviet Communist Party's condemnation of the kulaks to extermination was to prove twice as deadly.
    Army units were mobilized to drive the peasants from their land and confiscate their 'hoarded' grain for the cities and for export. Officers of the NKVD went with them to weed out suspected kulaks - which in practice meant any peasant who was a little harder working than his neighbours, or who resisted the move to collective farms. The Red Army, brutalized by the horrors of the Civil War, set out on its war against the peasants in the same spirit. There were summary executions, villages were burned and their inhabitants sent on forced marches in midwinter or packed on to cattle trucks for resettlement in great slave labour camps all over the Soviet Union. The deportees were called 'white coal' by their guards.
    'It was a second Civil War - this time against the peasants,' wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his epic history, The Gulag Archipelago, a 'literary investigation' of the terror of this period. 'It was indeed the Great Turning Point, or as the phrase had it, the Great Break. Only we are never told what it was that broke. It was the backbone of Russia.'
    By early 1930, after a winter of virtual warfare - virtual because one side was unarmed - half the farms of the Ukraine had been forcibly collectivized. On 2 March 1930 Stalin published an article in Pravda, the Party's newspaper, in which he blamed the violence and chaos of the winter months on local cadres who were 'Dizzy with Success'. The reality was that local Party members were confused and demoralized, the peasants had abandoned the new collective farms in droves, and peasant resistance to the system and its representatives had escalated to a level which caused even Stalin to call a temporary halt.
    Despite the horrors which were being played out in the countryside all around, Bibikov and the other cadres selected to build the great tractor factory pressed on.
    'When flocks of swallows returned from distant warm lands, when larks began buzzing in the air and the ground thawed under the gentle sun, the steppe began to glint with thousands of shovels,' writes the author of the official history, in the ringing language of a Pravda editorial. But conditions were grim. Teams of workers hauled loads of fresh-dug clay on sleds because of a lack of horsepower - fully half the horses of Russia were slaughtered by starving or vengeful peasants by 1934. Carpenters knocked together 150 rough-hewn barracks for the workers, and a makeshift underground kiln fired the first bricks to build the chimney of the brick factory proper. Two railway carriages were brought up on newly laid rails, one a bath-house and the other a mobile clinic. Liquid mud squirted up through the floorboards of the workshops, and every evening rows of mud-soaked bast shoes were laid outside the barracks to dry in the spring sunshine. Slowly, the walls of the factory began to rise out of the heavy clay fields from which they were built.
    It