Harvest
of Sorrow
by Robert Conquest
This
is the paperback edition. The hardback edit.on
is not available.
Book
Description
Book
Description
The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history
of one of the most horrendous human and social
tragedies of our century.
As
Robert Conquest shows in heart-rending detail,
Stalin's plan to collectivize Soviet agriculture
amounted to an unparalleled assault on the Soviet
peasantry and Unkrainian nation, resulting in
a death toll higher than that suffered in World
War I by all the belligerent nations combined.
Millions of men, women, and children died in
Arctic exile, while millions more perished in
the terror-famine of 1932-33. Then it was all
over, the survivors had been forced into the
new collective farms and were at last, with
the products of their labors, under strict party
and state control. In the Ukraine all centers
of independent national feeling had been crushed.
Conquest
meticulously reconstructs the background of
the tragic events: the lives and aspirations
of the peasants, the Ukrainian national struggle,
the motives and methods of the Communist leadership.
He carefully details the fate of villages and
individuals and seeks a true accounting of the
death toll, suppressed in official Societ statistics
but deducible from other sources. He desribes
the desperate condition of children who were
left homeless and recounts the various cruelties
and agonies of the man-made famine. He also
shows how the West was, to a large degree, deceived
about what was happening.
Like
The Great Terror, Conquest's classic account
of the Soviet mass purges of the late 1930s,
The Harvest of Sorrow is a powerful and moving
story that is also a work of authoritative scholarship.
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Reviews
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Editorial
Reviews
From
Library Journal
Conquest has a terrible story to tell.
He examines Stalin's assault on the Soviet
peasantry at the end of the 1920s and,
in particular, his genocideno other word
will doof the Ukrainian people in the
human-made famine of 1932-33. His horrific
details, drawn from Soviet as well as
Western sources, lead Conquest to conclude
that as many as 14.5 million died in the
years 1930-37 as a result of Stalin's
terror against the peasantry: five million
came from the Ukraine alone. These facts,
and the ghastly details behind them, are
not widely known in the West. In addition,
they are officially denied by the Soviets
to this day. This account by a leading
scholar should help to make the story
better known. R.H. Johnston, History Dept.,
McMaster Univ . , Hamilton, Ontario
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information,
Inc.
From
the Publisher
The first full history of one of the most
horrendous human tragedies of the 20th
century, The Harvest of Sorrow examines
the atrocities inflicted on the Russian
peasantry by the Soviet Communist party
between 1929 and 1933.
About
the Author
Robert
Conquest is a Senior Research Fellow and
Scholar-Curator of the East European Collection
at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, University.
He has authored numerous books on Soviet
studies and foreign policy. |
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Excerpt
Chapter
1: The Peasants and the Party - copyrighted
material
At
the beginning of 1927, the Soviet peasant, whether
Russian, Ukrainian, or other nationaility had
good reason to look forward to a tolerable future.
The land was his; and he was reasonably free
to dispose of his crop. The fearful period of
grain seizure, of peasant risings suppressed
in blood, of devastating famine, were over,
and the Bolshevik government seemed to have
adopted a reasonable settlement of the countryside's
interests.
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