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at a tempo unknown in the modern history of any people,were the fruit of the five-year plans and collectivizationof agriculture.The Soviet revolution in agriculture was an entirelynew approach to the problem of the peasantry, originallyshot through with the idea of solving the divorce betweentown and country by the transformation of the peasantsinto something like factory workers on the land. Theresults of the revolution were that in 1940 almost allthe agricultural production in the Union came from the240,000 consolidated collective farms that had taken theplace of the 25,000,000 separate peasant holdings thathad existed in 1928, still in many cases in scattered stripsin the open fields. On the collective farms, very variablein size but averaging perhaps seventy to eighty householdsand 1200 acres under crops, 75,000,000 individuals lived,mostly in compact villages. An administrative andtechnical staff of well over a million toiled with the taskof organizing the planned work, with accountancy, plantbiology, soil science, veterinary and other expert assistance.Another million served in the machine-tractorstations, the key to mechanization, which, after theconsolidation of small holdings into large farms, was thesecond most essential feature of collectivization.In 1914 the use of machines was the exception, thoughit had been increasing: half the ploughs in Russia werestill of a primitive wooden type, most of the sowing wasdone by hand, and, except on large estates and in thesouth and Siberia, the scythe, sickle, and flail were stillthe rule. By 1938 nearly three-quarters of the land wasploughed by tractors, and perhaps something like halfthe sowing and reaping of grain and almost all thethreshing were done by machines. This was indeed arevolution such as the Russian village had never known,and it made most of the collective farms vitally dependenton the machine-tractor stations, which were organizedquite apart from them, and in turn were entirelydependent on petrol supplies. They were also ofdecisive political importance through the 'politicalsections' attached to them, composed of picked partymen.124