ABSTRACT
Mass collectivization began in the summer of 1929 and at a rapid rate. The Soviet party and government envisaged that collectivization would be completed in a very short time in the priority regions, and as early as the spring of 1931 in the regions on the Volga and the northern Caucasus. The policy of industrialization was a return to idealized socialism. As an incentive to the workers, the authorities introduced "socialist competition" in the factories, by which individual factories or teams of workers were to compete with each other for high production. Beria was responsible for the purges in Georgia, Kaganovich was sent to the West Russian city of Smolensk, Malenkov arrived in Belarus and Armenia, and the troublesome Ukraine saw the appearance at various times of Molotov, Yezhov, and Khrashchev, who became the party chief there in 1938.
