Let’s unload some of that. A 1950 excerpt from Bertolt Brecht:
Thus through Kazakhstan, land of the nomads
Went the word and call of the academy.
Each work brigade challenged the other
To raise millet as never before.
And in village and field, in school and workshop
There was on this great day in spring excitement in the air.
And Berziyev summoned the leaders of the collectives
“Rosa Luxemburg” and “The New Way.”
“Short is the day. Out to the field!
Your worth as comrades is in the yield!”
That they might beat him in the contest
The old man challenged them in work.
And following the new rules of competition
He shared with them his finest seeds.
“Short is the day. Out to the field!
Your worth as comrades is in the yield!”
And when man and tractor returned
To Collective Kurman, a happy exhausted crew
They fetched the weights and scales
And weighed twenty-five hundred kilos per hectare.
—Stanzas 26 through 29 of Die Erziehung der Hirse (“The Rearing of Millet”) by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Robert C. Conard in collaboration with Ralph Ley (New German Critique Number 9, Autumn 1976)