1504. The Rise and Fall of “the Extraordinary Measures,” January –June, 1928: Toward a Reexamination of the Onset of the Stalin Revolution

Abstract

''The extraordinary measures" is a phrase frequently encountered in scholarly literature to describe the onset of mandatory grain procurements in the USSR at the end of 1927 and the first tentative steps toward the collectivization of agriculture.' Newly declassified archival materials, however, indicate that the extraordinary measures entailed more than a change in economic policy. Rather, contemporaries applied this label to the first of a series of mass police operations, that is, mass arrest campaigns undertaken by OGPU, the Soviet political police, against the countryside in the prewar years. The extraordinary measures thus heralded the onset of Stalin's Terror.