The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine

Daria Yarymowich was a freelance writer in Toronto.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Collectivization and the Terror Famine is a profoundly important work. What we encounter here is no mere setting down of heretofore unavailable fact. Conquest, in his painstakingly researched, meticulously crafted historical narrative, dazzles us with his ability to understand motive and attitude. Considering the events which transpired during Stalin’s war on the peasantry and the Ukrainian nation, an analytical approach is most helpful.

The author is supremely well-qualified for such a task. Prior to this, he has written over a dozen books dealing with various aspects of Russian history. Harrison Salisbury, reviewing The Great Terror in the Saturday Review, called Dr. Conquest “our greatest Kremlin elucidator” — an assessment unlikely to be challenged.

In the opening chapters, Conquest introduces the players in this grim drama: the peasantry, the Communist Party, and the Ukrainian nation. He then describes the conflicts of Marxist ideology, a peasantry who presented a serious impediment to realization of a socialist state, and the continuing Ukrainian struggle for self-determination.

Part II deals with the measures taken by leadership to resolve an alleged grain crisis. The course decided upon by a leadership bent on creating a new order, no matter what the cost, was grain seizures, collectivization and the deportation of millions of kulaks. Many of those deported did not survive. Overwork, starvation and disease killed an estimated quarter to a third of them. It is an agony to realize that the entire tragedy might have been averted had the Party been knowledgeable in the matter of market relations. On the other hand, it must be remembered that Stalinists considered humane attitudes a “capitalist weakness” and therefore unacceptable as part of Party doctrine.

The collectivization and “dekulakization” processes were accelerated in the period following the 1928 “grain crisis.” Private real estate virtually disappeared. The main section of this history describes the tragic consequences. In the course of this, millions sacrificed everything they had, including their lives. Resistance meant almost certain death. The famine that resulted when requisitioning exhausted all available food sources crippled the countryside, and the disaster was complete. The result was genocide.

This is a staggeringly difficult book to read. It comes as no surprise when the author reveals his own difficulty in writing it. Explaining how it was that nearly fifteen million people needlessly died an agonizing death is not something easily countenanced. Having said that, it must also be said that I consider the reading of it a moral obligation. We owe our deepest gratitude to Conquest for this faultless rendering of a gravely disturbing period in our history.

Mention must be made of the one positive note in the account. The spirit of those victimized by the regime’s devastating attack was not destroyed. Efforts to re-establish national feeling in the Ukraine continue still. Russification cannot be considered a success.