Five ears of corn law and Stalin

Kai-Petri · #1 (**permalink**) October 28th, 2007, 03:40 PM

"Thanks to Stalin's draconian "of five ears of corn" law, starving peasants caught taking even a handful of grain were imprisoned or shot by the OGPU..."

Does anybody know a site on this law or more info of it?

Thanx!

Hawkeye90 · #2 (**permalink**) October 28th, 2007, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Crude watchtowers were put up in the fields, posts with a hut of wood and straw atop them. Here guards armed with shotguns would look out for snippers; those who were driven by hunger to cut off ears of corn with scissors. Those who were caught got a minimum of ten years under the Law of Seven-eighths; some were shot. One Kharkov court issued fifteen hundred death sentences in a month; a woman was given a ten-year sentence for cutting one hundred ears of corn from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation.

From Famine in Russia

Za Rodinu · #3 (**permalink**) October 28th, 2007, 08:45 PM

Thank you, Hawkeye. One wonders where God is, sometimes.