by Robert Conquest

Author Information: Robert Conquest is Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the East European Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of over twenty books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs.

Book Description: The 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. (source)

Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by Orange Ukraine reader Rowan: "The Harvest of Sorrow, by Robert Conquest, covers the terror-famine/Голодомор that occurred under Stalin in the 1930s; it's considered to be a companion to The Great Terror. Conquest doesn't pull any punches in his criticism of the Soviet regime."

Book Links

Guarded Recommendation by Peter Wilson at NY Review of Books
Conquest and Wiles cheeky tit-for-tat
Much Friendlier National Review review
Full Conquest Bio at Hoover Institute
Amazon