harvests (as in 1972 and 1975) necessitated imports and slowed the economy. The 1976–1980 five-year plan shifted resources to agriculture, and 1978 saw a record harvest. Conditions were best in the temperate chernozem (black earth) belt stretching from Ukraine through southern Russia into the east, spanning the extreme southern portions of Siberia. In addition to cereals, cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, and flax were also major crops. Such performance showed that underlying potential was not lacking, which was not surprising as the agriculture in the Russian Empire was traditionally amongst the highest producing in the world, although rural social conditions since the October Revolution were hardly improved. Grains were mostly produced by the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, but vegetables and herbs often came from private plots. History During the Russian Civil War, Joseph Stalin's experience as political chief of various regions, carrying out the dictates of war communism, involved extracting grain from peasants, including extraction at gunpoint from those who were not supportive of the Bolshevik (Red) side of the war (such as Whites and Greens). After a grain crisis during 1928, Stalin established the USSR's system of state and collective farms when he moved to replace the New Economic Policy (NEP) with collective farming, which grouped peasants into collective farms (kolkhozy) and state farms (sovkhozy). These collective farms allowed for faster mechanization, and indeed, this period saw widespread use of farming machinery for the first time in many parts of the USSR, and a rapid recovery of agricultural outputs, which had been damaged by the Russian civil war. Both grain production, and the number of farm animals rose above pre-civil war levels by early 1931, before major famine undermined these initially good results. At the same time, individual farming and khutirs were liquidated through class discrimination identifying such elements as kulaks. In the Soviet propaganda kulaks were portrayed as counterrevolutionaries and organizers of anti-Soviet protests and terrorist acts. In Ukraine the Turkic name "korkulu" was adopted, which meant "dangerous". The word itself is foreign to Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, struggle with kulaks in Ukraine was taking place more intensely than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. Coincidentally with the start of First "pyatiletka" (5 year plan), a new commissariat of the Soviet Union was created, better known as Narkomzem (People's Commissariat of Land Cultivation) led by Yakov Yakovlev. After the speech on collectivization that Stalin gave to the