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The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1986.

The book

In 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute approached Conquest with the project of a book on the 1932-33 famine. The Ukrainian National Association, a New Jersey-based group, sponsored the work with a subside. The grant was earmarked for Conquest's research expenses, including the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, who, following the advice of the director of the Institute, started doing research for Robert Conquest’s book.

Conquest, accepting this sponsorship, was misperceived as being in the pocket of the Ukrainians. For this reason he replied:

"I did not do the book specifically on the Ukraine. About half the book is on the non-Ukrainian side, the rest of the Soviet peasantry--there is a whole chapter on the Kazakhs, for example. The sponsors made no attempt whatever to suggest what I should write. In fact I'm in trouble with some of them for refusing to drop the 'the' from 'the Ukraine.'"

U.S. Congress promoted awareness of the "Holodomor" and set a Congressional Commission on the Ukraine famine, which was authorized in 1985 and headed by James Mace, leading to a final report conclusion in 1988 that: "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-33." Mace's research formed the basis for Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine. For Mace's wife Nataliya Dzyubenko-Mace, the US Commission was instrumental in alerting the American public and politicians to these horrific crimes, helping rouse American society from “political lethargy”.

In 1986, Conquest published the resulting book dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the 1932-33 famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide.

"The Harvest of Sorrow" had a clear moral: that if the older Soviet leaders were direct accomplices in an artificially contrived famine, and the younger leaders today still justify such procedure, then it followed that they might be willing to kill tens of millions of foreigners or suffer a loss of millions of their own subjects in a war. Conquest said:

"I don't think they want to blow Western populations to pieces. But if they came to America and imposed the collective farm system, then they might well organize a famine."

Criticism

Writing in Slavic Review, demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver maintained that limited census data make a precise famine death count impossible. Instead, they offer a probable range of 3.2 to 5.5 million "excess deaths" for the entire Soviet Union from 1926 to 1939—a period that covers collectivization, the civil war in the countryside, the purges of the late `30s, and major epidemics of typhus and malaria. According to these experts, and Maksudov as well, Conquest made the most primitive of errors: He overestimated fertility rates and underrated the impact of assimilation, through which many Ukrainians were "redesignated" as Russians in the 1939 census. As a result, the cold warriors confuse population deficits (which included unborn children) with excess deaths.

In 1987 J. Arch Getty wrote on 'The London Review of Books':

"Conquest’s hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. Conquest’s book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today’s conservative political climate, with its ‘evil empire’ discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular."

In the same article J. Arch Getty shows his interpretation of facts, denying that famine was intentional from Stalin or planned whatsover, and stating that the blame had to be shared by activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest:

"Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist ‘Stalin Revolution’ which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups.

The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence."

References

1. ^ HILLIER, BEVIS (19 November 1986). "Harvest' of Soviet Terrorism Reaped by Historian Conquest". latimes.com. LA Times. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
2. ^ VLAD, Mariya. "James Mace, a Native American with Ukrainian blood". wumag.kiev.ua. Welcome to Ukraine (WU Magazine). Retrieved 9 October 2015.
3. ^ U.S. Embassy Ukraine Kyiv. "UKRAINE: THE HOLODOMOR AND THE POLITICS OF REMEMBRANCE: THE LEGACY OF STALIN'S 1932-33 FAMINE, 2006 November 30". wikileaks.org. Wikileaks PLUSD. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
4. "Robert Conquest – Historian – Obituary". Telegraph.uk. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
5. Barbara Anderson; Brian Silver. "Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR". Slavic Review. 44 (No.3 Autumn, 1985): 517–519. doi:10.2307/2498020. JSTOR 2498020. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
6. ^ Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (No. 2): 7–8. Retrieved 24 September 2015. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)

• Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine, Oxford University Press, 1986, ISBN 0195051807

• 1986 books
• Books about Joseph Stalin
• Books about Soviet repression
• Holodomor