Since WWII Jews around the world have routinely resolved to “never forget” Hitler’s brutal effort to destroy the Jewish people. So too all of us should determine to never forget the far costlier devastation visited upon Russia by Joseph Stalin. In concentration camps such as Belsen and Auschwitz the Nazis slaughtered some six million people, but a decade earlier, in the Ukraine and adjacent Cossack areas in southern Russia, the Bolsheviks killed nearly twice as many peasants—totaling more than all deaths in WWI. The late English historian Robert Conquest devoted much of his life to finding, rigorously documenting, and publishing the truth regarding what transpired in the Soviet Union between WWI and WWII. One of his most powerful treatises is Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, c. 1986). The book’s title is taken from “The Armament of Igor,” a poem lamenting that: “The black earth / Was sown with bones / And watered with blood / For a harvest of sorrow / On the land of Rus.’”
For many centuries Russian peasants were serfs—working the land of aristocratic landowners who often exploited them. Reform movements in the 19th century, much like anti-slave movements in America, led to their liberation in the 1860s. While certainly harsh by modern standards, their lot slowly improved, though like sharecroppers following the Civil War in America they were generally landless and impoverished in a nation firmly controlled by the Tsar and aristocracy. Thus the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was initially welcomed by peasants who often seized and carved up the large estates they worked on, hoping for the better life promised by the upheaval. Yet they “‘turned a completely deaf ear to ideas of Socialism’” (p. 44). As Boris Pasternak made clear, in a passage in Doctor Zhivago: “‘The peasant knows very well what he wants, better than you or I do . . . . When the revolution came and woke him up, he decided that this was the fulfillment of his dreams, his ancient dream of living anarchically on his own land by the work of his hands, in complete independence and without owing anything to anyone. Instead of that, he found the had only exchanged the old oppression of the Czarist state for the new, much harsher yoke of the revolutionary super-state’” (p. 52).
Realizing that the innate love of farmers for land ownership and free markets militated against his totalizing ideology, Lenin noted that he would ultimately “‘have to engage in the most decisive, ruthless struggle against them’” (p. 45). He’d found that Communists such as himself knew little about economics—as was evident when he tried to abolish money and banking—and quickly launched the New Economic Policy, effectively restoring important aspects of capitalism. He also had to find effective ways to encourage agricultural productivity, so he delayed collectivizing agriculture in the 1920s. By the end of that decade, however, Joseph Stalin had seized sufficient power to undertake the radical restructuring of Russian agriculture. A 1928 grain crisis prompted Party bureaucrats to mandate production quotas, taxes and distribution mechanisms. They also needed scapegoats to blame and signaled out the best, hardest working and most prosperous farmers (the kulaks who owned a few acres and a handful of animals and even hired laborers as needed) who seemed to qualify as closet capitalists and “wreckers.” As Stalin declared: “‘We have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of liquidating the kulak as a class’” (p. 115).
Stalin and the Soviet Politburo established the All Union People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, staffed by alleged “experts,” which was authorized to push the peasants into collectives and set utterly utopian, ludicrous goals for yearly harvests. Such policies (part of Stalin’s Five Year Plan) led to an “epoch of dekulakization, of collectivization, and of the terror-famine; of war against the Soviet peasantry, and later against the Ukrainian nation. It may be seen as none of the most significant, as well as one of the most dreadful, periods of modern times” (p. 116). Farmers who failed to meet their quotas or “hoarded” grain (even seed grain!) were arrested and resettled in remote regions if not shot or sent to camps. Conquest documented, in mind-numbing, heart-rending detail, this deliberate destruction of those who stood in the way of Stalin’s grand socialistic agenda. To the Party, in the words of a novelist, “‘Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything’” (p. 143). And in the “class struggle” intrinsic to Marxist analysis, evil classes must be destroyed. Sifting through all the documents available to him, Conquest estimates that at least fourteen million peasants perished. “Comparable to the deaths in the major wars of our time,” Stalin’s “harvest of sorrow” may rightly be called genocide.
Above all, Stalin targeted the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and Kuban, where a massive famine transpired in the early ‘30s. Party activists (generally dispatched from the cities and lacking any knowledge of agriculture) presided over the process. One of them recalled: “‘With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way’” (p. 233). One of the few Western journalists daring to discern and tell the truth, Malcolm Muggeridge, said: “‘I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants. The battlefield is as desolate as nay war and stretches wider; stretches over a large part of Russia. One the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They have gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert’” (p. 260).
Consequently, Soviet agriculture imploded. In 1954 the Nikita Khrushchev admitted that despite the more highly-mechanized farming techniques in the collectives “Soviet agriculture was producing less grain per capita and few cattle absolutely than had been achieved by the muzhik with his wooden plough under Tsarism forty years earlier” (p. 187). And what’s true for agriculture is true for the rest of the USSR under Communist rule—socialism inevitably destroys whatever it controls.
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First History to detail Stalin's Terror-Famine in Ukraine (death toll was higher than the total deaths for all countries in WWI)
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: Readers, you're invited to visit each of my reviews--most of them have photos that I took in Ukraine (over 600)--you'll learn lots about Ukraine and Ukrainians. The image gallery shows smaller photos, which are out of sequence. The preferable way is to see each review through my profile page since photos that are germane to that particular book/VHS/DVD are posted there with notes and are in sequential order.To visit my reviews: click on my pseudonym, Mandrivnyk, to get to my profile page; click on the tab called review; scroll to the bottom of the section, and click on see all reviews; click on each title, and on the left-hand side, click on see all images. The thumbnail images at the top of the page show whether photos have notes; roll your mouse over the image to find notes posted.Also, you're invited to visit my Listmania lists, which have materials sorted by subject matter.
Top reviews from other countries
- KJB CONST.Reviewed in Canada on December 25, 2023
Was part of a 4 book read on the HOLOMOR.
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- Dardo KruegerReviewed in Canada on March 30, 2017
Very well written account of a horrific crime against humanity ...
