You can see elements of this in the West as well: agricultural work is often done by precarious non-citizens, and every now and again an entire semi-trailer of these people being imported turn up dead.
Of course there is the human cost of such rapid change, but I wonder if the swiftness was compacting human immiersation into a tighter time frame rather than having it evened out over a long period of time. Perhaps the huge economic disruption led to more overall immiseration? Or did the planners think that rapidness would have resulted in less overall immiseration like a trolley problem? If South Korea was an example, students depised the pro-industrialization military dictators, but later generations have started to appreciated the fruits and sacrifice of pro-industrialization.
Interestingly as a side note, North Korea has a more corn based agriculture out of necessity to adapt to the poorer agricultural conditions of the north versus south, which was traditionally the farmland of Korea.
Anyway, even agricultural output grew in USSR until mid-80ies and, importantly, salaries were at least double of city workers' salaries.
Thanks for the recommendation.
* collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millions upon millions through starvation. All the act of a single, paranoid, murderous tyrant.
* Kruschev's love affair with corn, that ended up being a crop failure after a few lucky years in smaller trials. This is actually the more level-headed play than Stalin's, but such a large shift, even with a trial, was a gigantic failure.
Lately I've been completely enamored with the book How Asia Works lately, and in detailing the success and failure of many different Asian nations development in the 20th century, it homes in on agricultural independence as a corner stone for further economic development to industrialization. Without a broad base of independent small farmers, that have small farms that they can directly profit from, a large base of a middle class can never develop. Large industrial farms, favored both by capitalists and Marxists concentrate power into too few hands and are also far less productive in total agricultural output, even if they they are more profitable. It doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka, focusing more on north east Asia, but I would be quite curious about how and if Sri Lanka's land reforms from the 70s were effective.