This is especially true in the countryside, where the mass collectivisation during Mao's Great Leap Forward of half a century ago left farmland "collectively" owned.
Villagers sold their children.The party's answer was to move faster towards wholesale collectivisation, just as it had nationalised all private business.
Mr Snyder's book straightens the record in favour of the voiceless and forgotten.He starts with the 3.3m in Soviet Ukraine who died in the famine of 1933 that followed Stalin's ruthlessly destructive collectivisation.
Russia will need decades to undo the damage done by decades of Soviet collectivisation.
Agriculture has been consigned to the sidelines as Nanjie has used village labour to make instant noodles, beer, packaging materials and a variety of other products.The village owes its achievements to the collectivisation of its land, which has allowed it to redeploy surplus labour in industry.
Having snatched the land from the people in the disastrous collectivisation, the government gave it back to them (evenly shared among households) on longish leases, starting in the late 1980s.
Most probably, as Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal argue in "Chechnya: A small victorious war" (Pan Books, 1997), it was because they had resisted Stalinist collectivisation, and would be the natural leaders of the mountain peoples in any future insurgency.
That many died of famine due to forced collectivisation in Ukraine and elsewhere in 1928-33, in deportations of entire peoples later, or, at all times, in inhuman labour camps, rather than by overt execution, lessens his guilt not a jot.
When elected, in 1970, he had preached a glowing vision of economic and social equality; but nationalisation and collectivisation brought economic disaster, while the draining of Chile's reserves led to roaring inflation.
Kazakhstan seemed a vast and fractious place that had suffered greatly from forced population-movements and the collectivisation of its pastoralists.
Unlike Poland or Hungary, they were inside the Soviet Union, subject to the full force of collectivisation and Stalinist central planning.
