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After the 'Socialist Spring': Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR. By George Last. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. 288 pp., $95.00, ISBN 978-1-84545-552-1.
This study shows how collectivization changed East German agriculture in one administrative region around Erfurt, on the southwestern border with West Germany. The author focuses on the mid-level managers- administrators and party cadre-who balanced the needs of the people under them with the directives from above. Basing his study on extensive use of local archival evidence, Last shows how initial opposition to collectivization gave way to more veiled opposition after the measures taken in the "socialist spring" in April 1960, when party activists and the state coerced private farmers into agricultural collectives. Continuous pressure from the top...