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'and sown grasses, even though cereals still remain thestandard crop of at least three-quarters of Russia.The years of the Second Revolution, 1928-34, whenfood-rationing had to be reintroduced and when thenew industrial plans were being forced through at thesame time as the revolution on the land, were indeed'Russia's Iron Age.' By 1935 comparative order wasachieved through the reassurance given to the peasantsin the collective farms that they could keep most oftheir animals in individual ownership and could haveconsiderable opportunities for private production ontheir own small holdings, apart from work on the collectivefarms; concessions which were strictly limited in1939 when a general tightening up of collectivizationbegan.The reasons for the Second Revolution were partlyeconomic, partly political. When revolution came in1917 the peasants in their communes took for themselveswhat was left of the gentry's lands, and there was awelter of parcelling out and redistribution of holdings,and much of the previously consolidated holdings wasreincorporated in the communes. Ten years later, by1928, there were approximately twenty-five millionholdings where before there had been perhaps sixteenmillion. Some were compact, others still in scatteredstrips in the open fields, as they had been for centuries.But if the peasants at long last had the land, they hadalso to undergo the agonies of the civil war which pressedupon them with hardly less grimness than upon thetownsmen. It ended with the great famine and waveof disease of 1921-22, which was so widespread and soserious that international relief from Western countrieswas necessary, as had happened privately on a very smallscale in certain pre-1914 famines.Very important concessions were then made to thepeasants, beginning with the abandonment of 'war communism,'which had meant forced requisitions, and thesubstitution of an organized grain tax, at first in kind,then in money (cf. pp. 374-377). Under the New EconomicPolicy, adopted by Lenin in 1921—a policy of'state capitalism,' 'a mixed system' combining large-scale