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

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.

While there has been some historical mention of the forced famine created by Stalin against the Ukrainian people resulting, by some estimates, in the death by starvation of between seven and as many as eleven million people during the spring/summer of 1933, I have yet to read a book which provides the high level of information detailing the specifics of this atrocity and crime against humanity as submitted by this text. The author does an outstanding job in providing archival information supporting his points and includes testimony by first hand witness's of the horror these people experienced. From my own perspective, I can vouch for the information detailed because my very own parents were born and raised in the Ukraine and experienced first hand the forced famine. I read this book to them and they confirmed the details the author submitted. Also, my parents close circle of personal friends, who also experienced the effects of this famine first hand and lived to tell about it, agreed with this books' content and its portrayal of events that took place under the absolute direction of Stalin and the communist regime and its desire and drive to destroy the peoples of Ukraine. Reading a book is one thing. Holding discussions with eye witnesses who personally experienced this horror is quite another and imparts an indelible mark on ones understanding and empathy of this historically significant, and evil event.

The present day (2015) conflict between Russia and the Ukraine has deep seated roots that have a long history. This book documents the situation in the early 1930s when Stalin attempted to destroy Ukrainian nationalism, coupled with his general policies within the Soviet Union. In addition to deportations of families and executions, he followed agricultural policies that starved a large portion of the population. Millions died, particularly young children and older people. It was always dangerous having a mercurial leader like Stalin who distrusted everyone. People who carried out his policies one year, could themselves fall victim to purges and executions the next year. Reading history can tend to be dry (it is not written as a popular novel), but it is worth sticking to it to understand the background of the present conflict. Putin, like Stalin, seems intent on destroying Ukrainian nationalism for whatever reason.The book provides a good summary of the flawed economic policies of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Destroying the incentive for people to excel and advance themselves does not work well. That Is coupled with basic problems in Communist theory that fail to put proper values on distribution, and fail to properly match production with market needs.

To educate myself about Ukrainian history

An amazingly comprehensive collection of detailed information about the terror famine and the collectivisation drive that led up to it, particularly in the Ukraine and the Cossack regions, where a disproportionate number were murdered compared to the rest of the Soviet Union. As in The Great Terror, Conquest is objective in compiling and sourcing data, but does not hold back from reasoned judgments. It's a pity this book has not been more widely read. During the Cold War, Conquest was often dismissed as a Cold Warrior or anti-communist, and perhaps just as often used by right-wing extremists (and even anti-semites, who will actually find no justification whatever for their views in this book) to bolster their own agendas. Now that the books have been thrown open in Russia and the Ukraine, this book appears almost as an understatement of the horrors of the first half of the 1930s.

The original book about the Ukrainian FAMINE well written and researched by Conquest.

A little difficult to read as the sentences were chopped. Maybe American way of structuring the sentence.

One of the many names that have justifiably been applied to Joseph Stalin is Hunger Tsar. Nevertheless, it is well to be reminded, and this book does not fail to do so, that famine was far from unknown in Russia and the other countries that became the Soviet Union before the Soviets took over, also that the Holodomor, or Terror-Famine, of 1932-33 was not the first famine of the Soviet period. However, the 1932-33 famine was characterised not only by being 'the big one' but by being a deliberate punitive measure against the peasantry, not simply the unfortunate result of weather and other circumstances. Stalin put in place the policies that brought about the famine, and even though some doubt might remain as to whether he originally intended the death of 20-25 per cent of those living in the affected areas (up to 100 per cent in some villages), it is established as fact that the result of the policies was brought to his attention before it was altogether too late, and that he remained resolute in their application.Hardest hit were the grain growing areas of Ukraine and the Don and Kuban areas of Russia. Three million is a minimum estimate of those who died, plus a further million associated with collectivisation of the nomadic farmers of Kazakhstan, plus several hundred thousand 'Kulaks' shot or deported (often with their families) to Siberia, dying there. Historians continue to argue about whether the action constituted genocide - Ukrainian nationalism may have been a subsidiary target, and if the action was aimed at the peasantry as a group that too would constitute genocide by the UN definition - but there is no question that it was mass murder.This 1986 study was a pioneer in the field. It is very thorough and remains relevant and useful. The Soviet archives remained classified at the time, so Robert Conquest did not have access to them. Neither was he able to travel in the affected areas, speaking freely with survivors and those who knew survivors as their parents or grandparents. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that he seems not to have missed anything of great relevance. At the time there were gaps in the Soviet census data, and some had been deliberately falsified. Today's historians consider Conquest's estimates of deaths excessive (he says five million in Ukraine alone), but that does not invalidate the book as a whole, nor detract from the fact that the death toll - of which we shall never be certain - was horrifically large. The conditions suffered by those who survived as well as those who died were also in themselves a crime against humanity.This book is for those who want a detailed account and many references. Briefer and more recent coverage of the same subject matter can be found in Timothy Snyder's  Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin  and Andrea Graziosi's  The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-33 , both of which can be recommended in their own right. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and StalinThe Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-33

Very well written account of a horrific crime against humanity committed by Joseph Stalin and the soviet regime against innocent Ukrainian and Russian farmers. How lucky we are to be in Canada!

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