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The decade beginning with Stalin’s ascendancy in the late 1920s was one of unprecedented repression. The “war in the countryside” to enforce the collectivization of agriculture cost more than 10 million lives, about half of them by starvation. Purges took the lives of millions more, among them Babel, Kharms, Mandelshtam, Pilnyak, the peasant poet Nikolay Klyuyev (1887–1937), and the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940). In 1932 all independent literary groupings were dissolved and replaced by an institution that had no counterpart in the West, the Union of Soviet Writers. The union became the state’s instrument of control over literature, and expulsion ...(100 of 10831 words)