The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Paperback) In another tremendous masterpiece of Soviet history, Robert Conquest covers Stalin's manmade famines in this book. Here Conquest provides devastating evidence of the complete insanity and megalomania of communism, especially the Stalinist variety. Regardless of your political leanings, this book proves without a doubt what a cruel, deadly, and completely impossible system communism really is. Stalin and his yes-men decided to embark on an insane crash agricultural collectivization program in the 1920's and 30's, hoping to replace the "backwards" system of humble peasants on their own plots (which had been successful for millennia), with a glorious system of industrialized megafarms that would supply the state directly. The first problem was that the state usually required deliveries so impossibly high that the farmers/peasants had nothing left for themselves. This caused a complete breakdown in the agricultural economy (no incentives to produce), plus a famine in which 14 million people died. When the system failed, Stalin and his henchmen became obsessed with finding the "enemy" who was holding everything back. The enemy became the mostly fictitious group of people called "kulaks," theoretically prosperous peasants who were holding back the masses and the glorious Soviet future. Since these people mostly didn't exist, the regime had to invent them. Therefore any peasant who had one more cow, one more acre, and was slightly less emaciated than everyone else was branded as a kulak and eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were condemned for life in this insanity. Conquest provides plenty of evidence that the Soviet agricultural program could have been slightly more successful if they weren't busy killing and deporting such huge numbers of potential farmers, and if they had gotten over their irrational search for "enemies" and faced facts instead. Of special interest in this book is Conquest's side trip to Kazakhstan, where the Soviets attempted the same program, making nomadic peoples settle down and raise crops that couldn't possibly survive in the area. This led to a famine that killed one million people. This was an accident, but Stalin learned that famine could be used as a weapon. The book then focuses on the Ukraine, which was full of pesky nationalists who didn't want to be a part of the USSR. First, the regime decided for themselves that the "masses" in the Ukraine hated their own language, culture, and institutions (how could anyone possibly believe this?), and that the masses were being held from glory by a few backwards enemies who wanted to remain Ukrainian. Apparently the "true" workers of the Ukraine would want to be Russianized; so the Soviets executed, deported, or starved as "class enemies" every person who disagreed (that is, almost everybody). The resulting cultural chaos and failed agricultural system resulted in one of the greatest death tolls in history, taken out deliberately on the people of the Ukraine. This book is slightly weaker than Conquest's all time classic "The Great Terror," especially in the tendency toward statistical overload. He also assumes that you have read his other works, and keep many things under-explained in this book. Most of the officials and politicians in the book are only identified by their last names and have little or no introductions, plus Conquest assumes that you would know the meanings of esoteric terms like "Borotbist" or "Petliuraist." This can make the book difficult for the layman.