local growing conditions into account, and peasants were often required to supply much of their produce for nominal payment. Also, interference in the day-to-day affairs of peasant life often bred resentment and worker alienation across the countryside. The human toll was very large, with millions, perhaps as many as 5.3 million, dying from famine due largely to collectivisation, and much livestock was slaughtered by the peasants for their own consumption. In the collective and state farms, low labor productivity was a consequence for the entire Soviet period. As in other economic sectors, the government promoted Stakhanovism as a means to improve labor productivity. This system was thrilling to a few workers who had both the talent and the vanity to make everyone else's performance look bad, but it was generally regarded as dispiriting and a form of apple polishing by most workers, especially in the later decades of the union, when socialist idealism had become moribund among the rank-and-file. It also tended to be destructive of the state's capital equipment, which was thrashed and soon trashed instead of being well maintained. The sovkhozy tended to emphasize larger scale production than the kolkhozy and had the ability to specialize in certain crops. The government tended to supply them with better machinery and fertilizers, not least because Soviet ideology held them to be a higher step on the scale of socialist transition. Machine and tractor stations were established with the "lower form" of socialist farm, the kolkhoz, mainly in mind, because they were at first not trusted with ownership of their own capital equipment (too "capitalist") as well as not trusted to know how to use it well without close instruction. Labor productivity (and in turn incomes) tended to be greater on the sovkhozy. Workers in state farms received wages and social benefits, whereas those on the collective farms tended to receive a portion of the net income of their farm, based, in part, on the success of the harvest and their individual contribution. Although accounting for a small share of cultivated area, private plots produced a substantial share of the country's meat, milk, eggs, and vegetables. The private plots were also an important source of income for rural households. In 1977, families of kolkhoz members obtained 72% of their meat, 76% of their eggs and most of their potatoes from private holdings. Surplus products, as well as surplus livestock, were sold