[Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United State

[Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United States. And, yes, I have read the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is required reading in many United States schools.] No, the situations in the two countries were not at all comparable. First of all, there was no widespread famine in the United States. I have close relatives who lived through that era in that place (they never moved from their family farms) and are now more than ninety years old. Second, there was no governmental effort to keep the people who thought they were best off moving from moving. Third, both before and after the interstate moves, most of the people who moved were land-owners. Fourth (maybe this should be first on the list), all of the adults in the United States during the Great Depression, other than most black people in the South, were voters and able to influence the political system. Just outside the region I wrote about first here, the region you mentioned first, were grassroots political movements to represent farmer rights. (Nothing of the kind existed under Stalin's dictatorship.) Here in Minnesota, the state branch of the Democratic Party is actually formally named the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, having been formed by a merger (just about exactly seventy years ago) between the state Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, a third-party movement so powerful that it elected a governor during its heyday. So, no, in the United States we look at the historical experience of Stalinism as a wholly negative example, one of the worst examples of mass irrationality and needless human suffering in the twentieth century. Where the various branches of my family have lived for generations, we know better than to take Stalin's policies as models of modernization or anything worthwhile.