The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine Book

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 describes 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. 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. The acclaimed author of The Great Terror ducments a human tragedy of epic proportions ·A long-neglected chapter in the history of the twentieth century ·A heart-rending chronicle of the fate of villages and individuals under Stalin's collectivization program ·Seeks a true account of the death toll and shows how the West was deceivedRead More