The Harvest of Sorro: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine [Paperback]

The Harvest of Sorrowis 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 Sorrowis 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.

A fine, thoroughly documented full-dress historical study of this genocidal campaign. Conquest grabs his reader at the start. --National Review

Vital to understanding 'Stalin's revolution.' --Patrick J. Rollins,Old Dominion University

The Harvest of Sorrowis not just a heroic work of scholarship, but an embarrassment to Mikhail Gorbachev and an antidote to wishful thinking about the Soviet Union. *

Essential reading for those who wish to understand the nature of the Soviet system...likely to become a classic. --The Wall Street Journal

The Harvest of Sorrowis essential reading for those who wish to understand the nature of the Soviet system, and like Mr. Conquest's earlier account of Stalin's purl#|