Good books about collectivization in USSR and China?

[The CPSU Chairman]

Can anyone recommend any?

Preferably as unbiased as possible. A book that's too pro-Communist might exaggerate the good and gloss over the bad, while a book from a capitalist perspective would obviously be the opposite. I want to learn, not to have my preconceptions reinforced. :)

(sorry if this belongs in the Learning forum; I wasn't sure)

[Ismail]

The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 is good and objective.

Moved to Learning.

[Rooster]

There's quite a good section in An Economic History of the USSR by Alec Nove.

[RadioRaheem84]

Fanshen by William Hinton

A bit bias toward the Chinese Revolution but still good.

[ComradeOm]

The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 is good and objective.

Moved to Learning.That's pretty much the definitive work on the subject to date. Not one for someone unfamiliar with the topic however. Nove is a better introduction but even that's not the most readable of books

I do love the irony of tir1994 seconding that recommendation though

[DragonDrop]

It's not explicitly about collectivization, but there is a book called Gao Village by Mobo Gao that is a first hand account of life in a small agricultural village in Jiangxi province from 1949 to when it was written (late 90s, I think). It includes a lot of information about good and bad things about the commune system and the later Deng Xiaoping reforms, from the perspective of the peasants. It's not exactly unbiased, but it doesn't have an agenda (the author was an australian citizen by the time he wrote it, and it was published by a publishing company in Honolulu, so it was probably not subject to any censorship). It is fairly critical of the Chinese establishment intelligentsia.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 by James W. Heinzen

http://books.google.com/books?id=Zj83HmNUdYUC&printsec=frontcover



And here's one I'm reading now for its critical take on the lesser known path of sovkhozization:

Stalin's peasants: resistance and survival in the Russian village after collectivization by Sheila Fitzpatrick

http://books.google.ca/books?id=YlBvcNMlr4EC&printsec=frontcover

In addition to the various urban destination, peasants leaving the village and/or the kolkhoz had another option, namely to go and work as a hired hand at a state farm (sovkhoz).

[...]

The high point was reached in August 1932, when almost 2.7 million were working in state farms [...] In 1937, there were only 1.2 million sovkhoz workers (66 percent of whom were permanent). It is evident that peasants had used the state farm as a temporary refuge against famine, much as homeless children would use the orphanages in winter. When the crisis passed, many of those who had gone to work in the sovkhoz went back to the village and resumed work as kolkhozniks.

Unlike peasants, laborers on state farms received the desirable social classification of "proletarian" (as batraks had done in the 1920). But this was one of the few advantages of working on a state farm in the early 1930s - and its main practical consequences, preferential access to secondary and higher education for one's children, was at best of secondary importance to most rural people. The sovkhoz was not attractive to peasants in the early 1930s because conditions were bad and pay was low. Working at a state farm generally meant living in hastily constructed temporary accommodation of the most primitive type, barracks or mudhuts (zemlianki). The typical sovkhoz dormitory of the early 1930s had no heating, no cooking facilities, no running water, and no bathhouse. The workers ate poorly in a communal dining room that was often lacking the barest necessities like spoons and bowls. Until 1933, sovkhoz workers were forbidden to keep animals or cultivate a private plot.