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Collectivisation
The policy of consolidating individual landholdings and labour into collective farms, implemented most notably by Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929, often through coercion and force.
Five-Year Plans
Economic programs aimed at industrial and agricultural development through state-led planning.
Great Leap Forward
Campaign aimed at rapid modernization that instead caused severe famine and economic failure.
Land Reform
Government redistribution of agricultural land from large landowners to peasant farmers, often involving confiscation and political mobilisation of the rural population.
Lysenkoism
A pseudoscientific agricultural theory promoted by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, rejecting genetics in favour of environmental conditioning of crops, adopted in Maoist China with disastrous consequences for food production.
People's Communes
Large-scale collective units introduced during the Great Leap Forward that merged agricultural cooperatives, combining farming, industry, education, and militia functions under a single administrative body.
Red Guards
Youth groups mobilized by Mao to enforce revolutionary ideology and attack perceived enemies.
Third Front
A massive industrialisation programme launched in 1964 to relocate strategic industries to remote inland provinces of China, motivated by fears of foreign invasion and nuclear attack.