Stalin attempted to pacify the peasant households by calling for “a cow in every peasant household.” Not only was he trying to appease the peasants but he was also using a diversionary tactic to take attention away from the massive starvation among the peasant households. What he didn’t count on was, as Daniel Field suggests, “peasants appear at times to have exploited official preconceptions about themselves for their own ends.” How were the peasants, and particularly the peasant women able to take advantage of their encounters with Soviet authority?
The section which mentioned the cows was pretty interesting. Women were made out to be crazy and insane, pretty much like how women are depicted today when they are trying to stand up for themselves. The state even tried to “educate” them because they wanted them essentially to stop rioting. But these women did see the power in doing these protests to gain attention.