An Unusable Past
Nicolas Grospierre’s photographs of collective farm buildings in Israel and the Baltic states reveal these communities’ utopian dreams — and their uncomfortable colonial underpinnings.
(Photography by Nicolas Grospierre)
One thing that anyone with even a minimal understanding of twentieth-century communism knows is that collective farming was a disaster. In the early 1930s, the Soviet collectivization project helped create a horrendous famine that killed millions. In the late 1950s, a similar project under China’s Great Leap Forward led to an even greater catastrophe, causing […]
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