The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine [Paperback]

 

 

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Highly acclaimed, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is a British historian's detailed, documented account of the horrific events in Soviet Ukraine in 1929-1932 during Stalin's reign wherein millions perished by means of man-made starvation.

Awards and honors of British historian Robert Conquest include: the Jefferson Lectureship, the highest honor the federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities (1993); the Alexis de Tocqueville Award (1992); the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters (1999); the Fondazione Liberal Career Award (2004); the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005); and the Ukraine Presidential Medal of Honor (2006). The Ukraine Presidential Medal of Yaroslav Mudryi, named for the Kyivan prince known as a lawgiver and patron of the church and the arts (early 1000s), was given in recognition of Dr. Conquest's path-breaking scholarship on the Ukrainian famine 1932-1933 in Harvest of Sorrow (1986). The Medal is the highest honor bestowed by Ukraine.

By 2006, Dr. Conquest had authored twenty-one books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs, including the classic, The Great Terror, which has been translated into twenty languages, and the acclaimed Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1986). His field of expertise is Russian and world politics and history. His many professional affiliations include former research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. This is but a brief outline of Robert Conquest's curriculum vitae; that his credentials are distinguished, formidable, and impressive goes without saying.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine was sponsored by Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute and the Ukrainian National Association. Among many others, the major research and discussion contributions of American historian, James Mace, PhD, Harvard University, are specifically acknowledged. Various resources in Europe and in America were utilized; special acknowledgement is made to the Hoover Institution's Library and Archives.

The purpose of Harvest of Sorrow is to raise public awareness of the events which took place within living memory, and which involved millions of people and millions of deaths.

Three reasons are stated for the lack of public awareness of the Ukrainian famine (known in Ukrainian as Holodomor). First, the terminology doesn't resonate with the same connotation--the word `peasant' doesn't have the same meaning to an American or Briton as it does to the Ukrainian or Russian. Second, Ukraine wasn't an independent nation at the time of writing of The Harvest of Sorrow; on maps, Ukraine appeared as part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. And, third and most importantly, the concealment of facts by Stalin and the Soviet authorities ensured that the world was kept uninformed or confused.

The events chronicled in Harvest of Sorrow cover the period 1929-1932 (about the same length of time as that of the First World War). "Though confined to a single state, the number dying in Stalin's war against the peasants was higher than the total deaths for all countries in World War I."

Evidence cited in Harvest of Sorrow is from a variety of confirmatory sources so that no serious doubts should remain about any aspect of the period. Types of evidence referenced include: Soviet scholars, the Soviet press, confidential documents that have reached the West (`Smolensk Archives' at Harvard), the testimony of former Party activists (including General Petro Grigorenko and Dr. Lev Kopelev), foreign correspondents, foreign citizens, and first-hand reports of survivors. "For a long time testimony which was both honest and true was doubted or denounced--by Soviet spokesmen, of course, but also by many in the West who for various reasons were not ready to face the appalling facts." The sheer amount of evidence is enormous, and the material is confirmatory.

Following the Preface and Introduction are three Parts, the Epilogue, which includes Notes, Selected Bibliography, and Index.

In the Preface, we're told that Ukrainian spellings of Ukrainian place and personal names were used, with the exception of Kiev (Kyiv), Kharkov (Kharkiv) and Odessa (Odesa). Additionally, Dr. Conquest used "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine." He acknowledged that at the time, a number of Ukrainians found the reference to "the Ukraine" derogatory; however, he used the phrase since at the time of writing, it was used by Western scholars, translations from prominent Ukrainian writers used the phrase (because of their imperfect knowledge of English), and by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Note: Ukraine gained independence in 1991. The website reads Embassy of Ukraine (not Embassy of the Ukraine); the government officially calls the country "Ukraine" (one word) and not "the Ukraine."

The Introduction states, in part, that a historian's duty is to discover and register what actually happened--to put the facts beyond doubt and in their context. And, that is precisely what Dr. Conquest accomplishes.

The Contents include: Preface; Introduction; Part I: The Protagonists: Party, Peasants and Nation; Part II: To Crush the Peasantry; Part III: The Terror-Famine; Epilogue: Notes (pgs. 348-394), Selected Bibliography (pgs. 394-398), and Index (pg. 398-412).

Eleven archival photos evidence some of the very many atrocities. Background material is extensive, documented, detailed, and very informative.

A horrendous chapter from Ukraine's history is exposed and documented. `A quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbors.' History that needs to be made known is presented in engrossing format with voluminous evidence. Deserving acclaim; deserving to be on library shelves, both personal and public, worldwide! A riveting read--definitely five stars, plus!

Addendum: In spite of the efforts of some to deny the Ukrainian Holodomor, Kyiv Post, in its November 17, 2008 issue, reported: "Representatives of around 40 countries will come to Ukraine to participate in events dedicated to the memory of the 75th Anniversary of the Holodomor Famine in 1932-1933," including: the Presidents of Macedonia, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and also Bosnia and Herzegovina; Parliamentary Delegations from Moldova, France, Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, Spain, Croatia, Finland, and Liechtenstein; and, a Delegation from UNESCO, the European parliament, the OSCE, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Addendum: Please go to Amazon.com to read my three-part rebuttal comments regarding Jeffrey L. Thurston's review, which is posted on this Canadian site in addition to the American site. Since Amazon.ca doesn't offer the option of adding a comment, I only added it to the Amazon.com site.

Robert Conquest characterizes rightly the Ukranian genocide perpetrated by the CP under Stalin as 'one of the most dreadful periods of modern times'. (A. Koestler: 'starving children looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles'.)
He clearly explains the reader that it was an ideological as well as a political scheme; ideological, because it aimed at replacing private agriculture (the kulaks) by collective farms; political, because it aimed at crushing the Ukranian minority. The result was about 15 million deaths through deportation, starvation or direct liquidation.
This book contains excellent historical, political and ideological (Marx, Engels) background on the collectivization problem which would haunt the USSR until his final days: bureaucratization and rampant inefficiency.
Robert Conquest's book gives us an appalling picture of Lenin's terror reign and, after his death, of the power struggle at the top of the CP. The outcome was that one man through one party wielded totally uncontrolled power in an enormous country. He had even the power to inflict genocides without having to justify himself.
This book shows the USSR as a ghost state (reflected in the media) where all contact with reality was lost, as so brilliantly described in Ismail Kadare's novels. For the bureaucrats terror and obedience to any order from above became a normal method of administration.
When one ultimately askes why and how all those, humanly speaking, devastating facts could happen, I should remind the last words of Prof. David Chandler's magisterial book on Pol Pot's death camp 'Voices from S-21': 'the real truth ... is to be found in ourselves'.
The Ukranian genocide is not unique in the 20th century with its Nazi camps, Indonesian, Rwandan, Armenian or Bosnian mass killings.
A terrible but necessary book.
I should also recommend a prime eye-witness of this tragedy: Miron Dolot's 'The Hidden Holocaust'.

Conquest's examination of Stalin's calamitous decision to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union is not an easy read, nor should it be. It is a worthy companion to the author's great work on Stalin's reign of terror in the '30s, and in fact serves as a "prequel" to the latter, having been published some 15 years later.

The great strength of the work lies in Conquest's meticulous efforts to explicate the roots of the communist regime's ruthless murder of millions of peasants. He details Marx's and, more importantly, Lenin's disdain for the peasantry, an underlying hatred that helps to explain Stalin's justification for departing from Lenin's pragmatic decision to embark on a "New Economic Policy" in 1921 that -- against his ideological bias -- offered new freedoms that spawned the despised class known as the Kulaks. Without this groundwork, one is tempted to dismiss the human destruction as the mere abberations of a sick mind.

Conquest makes abundantly clear that these supposedly fabulously wealthy farmers -- the Kulaks -- were in fact people of very modest means. Their greatest crime, of course, was that they obstinately resisted Stalin's determination that capitalism would be wiped from the countryside, whatever the cost. Much of the last half of the book recounts in stark detail the incredibly costly, but ultimately successful, effort to end peasant resistance to collectivization. Importantly, he points out, even after all realistic Kulak "resistance" had been eliminated, the Soviets continued to claim that the threat continued and extended their seasons of murder. And even for the most coldly pragmatic, he also convincingly argues that the collectivization was an unmitigated economic disaster that killed incentive and left nearly barren a countryside that in the hands of an intelligent leader should have been turned into one of the most productive in the world.

If one were to ask, what is the point of reading and recalling this hideous chapter in Russian and human history, one might just as well ask, why remember the Holocaust? While the circumstances of human history may change, the motivations that drive individuals remain quite consistent. Stalin, in the end, shrugged off the Marxist theory to which he professed he was committed in favor of the naked pursuit of power. Economic theory served as nothing more than a justification for the slaughter of millions of human beings. Leaders who in the future aspire to the kind of local and world power that Hitler and Stalin achieved will reveal their motivations to those who are vigilant, and it will be to humanity's great profit if those with sufficient awareness and foresight are able to thwart those efforts.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The "Human" Face of Communism
We have heard so many excuses for the disaster that we call Soviet communism that one can almost recite them by heart - communism has never been tried, communism rescued citizens... Read more

Published on Nov 7 2003 by Avid Reader

5.0 out of 5 stars Communism vs. Ukraine: 1-0
19th-century Ukrainian peasants lived in serfdom that was so agriculturally inefficient that it was comparable to 14th-century England. Read more

Published on Oct 23 2003 by Ben Hekster

5.0 out of 5 stars Just wonderful
This is the only full account of Stalins war on the peasentry in which millions were killed. Conquest states that 'the Ukrain was one large Belsen'(reffereing to the Nazi... Read more

Published on Sep 14 2003 by Seth J. Frantzman

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Example Of A Failed Soviet Plan
"Harvest of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest is one of the most well-known examinations of the Bolshevist-to-Stalinist agricultural policies, primarily in the Soviet Ukraine during the... Read more

Published on Mar 17 2003 by K. Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Painful reading
I have finally stumbled on a book that has the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide by Stalin as its main topic. Read more

Published on Dec 1 2002 by DICK

3.0 out of 5 stars A must read for students of the SU- but be wary
To those who follow the field, all historians agree that the Ukrainian famine of the early '30s was responsible for a great tragedy. Read more

Published on July 20 2002 by Virgil

5.0 out of 5 stars The Horror and Futility of It All
In another tremendous masterpiece of Soviet history, Robert Conquest covers Stalin's manmade famines in this book. Read more

Published on Nov 11 2001 by doomsdayer520

5.0 out of 5 stars the world as it is, not as we would like it
Robert Conquest has endured the slurs of the Communist Left in America and Europe as he continues to recall history as a way to chronicle the fight for individual liberty. Read more

Published on Aug 31 2001 by Eugene A Jewett

5.0 out of 5 stars Terror and Sorrow
This book is a model of historical reseach: detailed, precise, and analytical, it also conveys the human element of one of the great tragedies in history. Read more

Published on Aug 3 2001 by unraveler

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Account Stalin's Purges in the Ukraine
I first picked up this book for a report in a Russian History Class in college. Although it has been a few years that I have read this book, many of the facts and descriptions... Read more

Published on July 15 2001 by Robert Von Gerds

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