The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famineThe Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I. Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history. |
Contents
Preface | 1 |
PARTY PEASANTS AND NATION | 11 |
Stalemate 19211927 | 58 |
TO CRUSH THE PEASANTRY | 85 |
The Fate of the Kulaks | 117 |
Crash Collectivization and its Defeat | 144 |
The End of the Free Peasantry 19301932 | 164 |
Central Asia and the Kazakh Tragedy | 189 |
A Land Laid Waste | 260 |
Kuban Don and Volga | 274 |
Children | 283 |
The Death Roll | 299 |
The Record of the West | 308 |
Responsibilities | 322 |
Epilogue THE AFTERMATH | 331 |
Notes | 348 |
The Churches and the People | 199 |
THE TERRORFAMINE | 215 |
Assault on the Ukraine193032 | 217 |
The Famine Rages | 225 |
| 394 | |
| 397 | |
Other editions - View all
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine Robert Conquest No preview available - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
activists agricultural areas arrested attacked Bolshevik bread Bukharin camps cattle Central Committee church class enemy collective farm collectivization Commissar Communist Communist Party confiscation Congress Cossacks countryside cultural death December decree dekulakization died district Dnipropetrovsk economic estimated exile fact Fainsod families famine February figures force former grain Grossman harvest horses households Ibid industrial January Kazakh Kazakhstan Kharkov Khrushchev Kiev kolkhoz Komsomol Kossior KPSS Kuban kulak labour land later Lenin Lewin livestock March Marxist mass middle peasant million tons Moreover Moscow nationalist NKVD North Caucasus November official OGPU organization Party's peasantry peasants period Pidhainy Politburo political Poltava Poltava Province poor peasants population Postyshev Pravda production quoted regime reported revolution rural Russian sabotage sent shot Siberia social socialist Soviet government SSSR Stalin stanitsa starvation starving struggle terror told tractors Ukraine Ukrainian national Ukrainian Party USSR Verbytsky village Soviet Visti Volga whole workers Woropay