Pankraj Mishra’s illuminating piece on the Great Famine in Mao’s China partially muddles the Soviet precedent by focussing on Stalin alone (“The Hungry Years,” December 10th). Mishra writes, referring to the New Economic Policy of 1921-28, that “the Bolsheviks initially experimented, partly successfully, with free-market agriculture and private ownership.” At the end of the nineteen-twenties, Stalin launched his collectivization drive, which led to major famine. However, Stalin’s “Great Break” was rooted in the earlier era of “war communism,” which lasted from 1918 to 1920. Collectivization began in 1928, as a return to draconian Russian-civil-war-era grain requisitioning—itself a major cause of the first Soviet famine, which took place between 1921 and 1922. Without understanding the military-utopian Bolshevism of this earlier period, it is all too easy to pin the blame on the dictator alone. But Stalin’s mentality—and this goes for Mao’s as well—was rooted in his Communist regime, with its vast projects of coercive social engineering, which first crystallized in revolutionary civil war.