Rating: 
Summary: Another Example Of A Failed Soviet Plan
Review: "Harvest of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest is one of the most well-known examinations of the Bolshevist-to-Stalinist agricultural policies, primarily in the Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s and 1930s. The life and times of the Kulaks was recounted as well as the persecution they endured under Stalin and the Soviet Union's collectivization policies. Stalin's totalitarianism, persecution and murder of millions is well known and documented in history, but his disastrous collectivizationist agricultural policies are often overlooked and not closely scrutinized when covering his reign of terror.Millions of people starved to death in a region that was the "bread-basket" of the Soviet Union. Some out of desperation ate wall paper. The misery of millions was caused by this illogical policy, but instead of altering it, Stalin blamed not himself but--you guessed it--the Kulaks. After the massive declines in agricultural production because of the Kulak's lack of incentive to work what did Stalin do? Accuse them of being recalcitrant counter-revolutionaries because they wouldn't work for free. He punished them further with killings, deportations to labor camps, and harassment by communist officials, in a futile attempt to motivate them to produce. Will people toil the fields performing back-breaking labor to have their work confiscated by the government? The Kulaks stopped producing wheat, and then sent what they harvested above subsistence level to rot, throwing it into the river. Other communist collectivization policies related to this book by Conquest are thos of the Later communist followers of the Soviet Communist model: Mao's China, in which 35 million people died. Later, the post-1975 communist Vietnamese under Le Duan did the same, resulting in a near famine. During this time of communist collectivization, the Vietnamese were actually importing rice from other countries because their farmers wouldn't grow produce any. This is a history lesson on stupidity. Hopefully, because of books like these, history will not repeat itself.
Rating:
Summary: Another Example Of A Failed Soviet Plan
Review: "Harvest of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest is one of the most well-known examinations of the Bolshevist-to-Stalinist agricultural policies, primarily in the Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s and 1930s. The life and times of the Kulaks was recounted as well as the persecution they endured under Stalin and the Soviet Union's collectivization policies. Stalin's totalitarianism, persecution and murder of millions is well known and documented in history, but his disastrous collectivizationist agricultural policies are often overlooked and not closely scrutinized when covering his reign of terror. Millions of people starved to death in a region that was the "bread-basket" of the Soviet Union. Some out of desperation ate wall paper. The misery of millions was caused by this illogical policy, but instead of altering it, Stalin blamed not himself but--you guessed it--the Kulaks. After the massive declines in agricultural production because of the Kulak's lack of incentive to work what did Stalin do? Accuse them of being recalcitrant counter-revolutionaries because they wouldn't work for free. He punished them further with killings, deportations to labor camps, and harassment by communist officials, in a futile attempt to motivate them to produce. Will people toil the fields performing back-breaking labor to have their work confiscated by the government? The Kulaks stopped producing wheat, and then sent what they harvested above subsistence level to rot, throwing it into the river. Other communist collectivization policies related to this book by Conquest are thos of the Later communist followers of the Soviet Communist model: Mao's China, in which 35 million people died. Later, the post-1975 communist Vietnamese under Le Duan did the same, resulting in a near famine. During this time of communist collectivization, the Vietnamese were actually importing rice from other countries because their farmers wouldn't grow produce any. This is a history lesson on stupidity. Hopefully, because of books like these, history will not repeat itself.
Rating:
Summary: How did it happen? The Soviet Union's real story.
Review: "Harvest of Sorrow" is an important book for any age. Meticulous, rich with history, but refreshingly straight-on; Conquest knows and writes of the Soviet Union in a way that will bring everyone who reads this book to a much closer understanding of what really went on economically, and the twisted fates of 20 million people under communist manipulation and control . All that has helped bring mother Russia to the point she is today. In chaos and turmoil, and on her knees. This book should play an important role in every high school civics class today, and find its way to the reading tables of anyone interested in the economics and agricultural systems of communism.
Rating:
Summary: How did it happen? The Soviet Union's real story.
Review: "Harvest of Sorrow" is an important book for any age. Meticulous, rich with history, but refreshingly straight-on; Conquest knows and writes of the Soviet Union in a way that will bring everyone who reads this book to a much closer understanding of what really went on economically, and the twisted fates of 20 million people under communist manipulation and control . All that has helped bring mother Russia to the point she is today. In chaos and turmoil, and on her knees. This book should play an important role in every high school civics class today, and find its way to the reading tables of anyone interested in the economics and agricultural systems of communism.
Rating:
Summary: Communism vs. Ukraine: 1-0
Review: 19th-century Ukrainian peasants lived in serfdom that was so agriculturally inefficient that it was comparable to 14th-century England. But with the growing urban population the need for political and agricultural reform was recognized, and under the Tsar came the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs and the privatisation of communal holdings in 1906, so that they gained some degree of freedom. And as their lives improved, so did production.
Unfortunately, self-determination did not fit into Marxist theory. The intelligentsia felt only contempt for the peasantry, which it saw as an impediment to social progress. 9 million died when the peasants revolted against the Bolshevik coup in the 1918-1920 Peasant War.
Driven by their obsessive analysis of everything as 'bourgeois' or 'proletariat', the Bolsheviks set out to find class struggle in the countryside. Invention of the all-evil kulak farmer enabled them to perpetrate violence against anyone who might resist Soviet power-- in reality, anyone who was slightly more productive or who showed any kind of initiative. One individual who organized a fire-fight was 'exposed' as a kulak. More to the point, the infinitely malleable kulak allowed the Soviet government to perpetrate its war on Ukraine.
With typical Soviet planning, the Government requisitioned so much grain that none was left for seeding. As a result, the Great Famine of 1921-1922 took an astounding 5 million lives, far exceeding anything seen under the Tsar. Yet, American food aid was prevented from reaching starving Ukrainians and grain was even exported to Russia.
This could at least theoretically be attributed to sheer incompetence and stupidity. And in 1928, a market fluctuation misinterpreted by Marxist planners again led the State to requisitioning. But stealing the fruit of the peasants' labour obliterated any trust they might still have had in Communists and destroyed all incentive to work. Far from humbled by their first disastrous experience, the Soviet government set out on a bold experiment of to forcibly collectivise all private farming in one year. Showing abundance at least in hubris, Stalin's economist Strumilin: "Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws." The five year-plan rolled out in 1929 caused fantastic wastage, tens of thousands of tons of grain left rotting because of poorly planned distribution.
To perpetrate collectivisation, the Soviet government used all the methods of terror at its disposal. Arrest, blackmail, torture, deporation, exile, labor camps, and execution were applied routinely under the euphemistic denomination of 'dekulakization'. Children and wives were sentenced as "members of the family of a traitor to the motherland." A Soviet analysis calculated that at one point, 400,000 households had been dekulakized, 350,000 still remaining to be, and 250,000 households having 'self-dekulakized'. 1 million died in the collectivisation terror, and another 4 million in labor camps. One novelist wrote: "Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything."
Having robbed the villages of their most productive members and replacing them with urban sadists, agriculture totally collapsed. The kolkhoz itself proved economically disastrous having about one-sixth the productivity of an American farm. Farmers received one half pound of bread daily and a salary which enabled them to purchase a single pair of shoes at the end of the year. Tractors were unreliable and so scarce they had to be shared between farms a hundred miles apart. The cost of the terror infrastructure and massive bureaucracy meant there was not even an economic benefit to collectivisation.
The Government set grain prices so absurdly low that they didn't even cover costs. By multiplying total theoretical acreage with the maximum possible yield per acre, they set production quotas that in practice left nothing at all for next year's crop, let alone for food. Hungry and unable to work, fields were left uncultivated and crops spoiled.
Peasants were shot for trying to reach the gigantic quantities of grain left rotting in the open air or withheld 'in reserve', they were even shot for cutting corn from their own gardens. Ukrainians were prevented from reaching Russia, where food was plenty. Finally they gave in and did what Stalin asked them to: they died. Corpses were removed daily by the trainload to God knows where. Mothers went insane trying to starve their weaker children in order to save her others. Orphans were brought to the children's concentration camp in Kirovohrad to starve, then trucked out under the cover of night. Some kids were cultivated as NKVD interrogators.
The suffering described in this book is enough to drive anyone to tears.
The advantage of another 7 million dead Ukrainians was that Russians could be moved into their homes and begin the assault on Ukrainian nationalism. The kozbars, blind bards travelling through villages singing national songs, were invited to a congress where they were all executed. Skrypnyk was sentenced for introducing the soft 'L' and hard 'G' into the alphabet: the hard 'G' in particular had apparently aided 'wreckers'. Russian replaced Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and Ukrainian authors and linguists were almost entirely liquidated. Priests were dekulakized. Cossack stanitsas that put up strong resistance were deported wholesale, entire populations of tens of thousands.
Still, the Communists touted the success of their system to the world-- though the census figures needed a bit of fudging to hide the fact that a sizeable chunk of the population no longer existed.
The commentary and reporting of the likes of Walter Duranty of the New York Times or George Bernard Shaw are disgraceful. Duranty was described as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism." At least he got a Pulitzer out of it. I hope he chokes on it.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting portrayal Soviet genocide of the Ukrainian nation.
Review: A riveting portrayal of the man-made genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine, organized by Stalin and his henchmen, this book marks the epitome of the research and writings of noted historian Robert Conquest. It is a must for any student seriously interested in understanding why the Soviet Empire was so despised by many of the captive nations and why Ukrainians were amongst those who most desperately resisted the imposition of communist rule and the continued existence of the Soviet system. Most shocking is the actual story of this genocidal deed, but the obfuscation and propaganda of Soviet apologists in the West, at that time (1930s) and since, is almost equally appalling. That some of these communists who committed this crime against humanity (and many more war crimes subsequently) still remain unpunished, in our midst here in North America, Israel and western Europe, is nothing less than a sin against humankind and God.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative, but a bit too academic
Review: A very thorough account of the collectivization of farms in Ukraine and the resulting starvation of the families who grew the food that got shipped elsewhere by order of the communist authorities. It's a more heady and academic read than I would like, but certainly worthwhile as a history of that time and place.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping
Review: An excellent read. Sad. Tragic. Truthful. God Bless America!
Rating:
Summary: Towering Achievement
Review: Conquest's examination of Stalin's calamitous decision to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union is not an easy read, nor should it be. It is a worthy companion to the author's great work on Stalin's reign of terror in the '30s, and in fact serves as a "prequel" to the latter, having been published some 15 years later. The great strength of the work lies in Conquest's meticulous efforts to explicate the roots of the communist regime's ruthless murder of millions of peasants. He details Marx's and, more importantly, Lenin's disdain for the peasantry, an underlying hatred that helps to explain Stalin's justification for departing from Lenin's pragmatic decision to embark on a "New Economic Policy" in 1921 that -- against his ideological bias -- offered new freedoms that spawned the despised class known as the Kulaks. Without this groundwork, one is tempted to dismiss the human destruction as the mere abberations of a sick mind. Conquest makes abundantly clear that these supposedly fabulously wealthy farmers -- the Kulaks -- were in fact people of very modest means. Their greatest crime, of course, was that they obstinately resisted Stalin's determination that capitalism would be wiped from the countryside, whatever the cost. Much of the last half of the book recounts in stark detail the incredibly costly, but ultimately successful, effort to end peasant resistance to collectivization. Importantly, he points out, even after all realistic Kulak "resistance" had been eliminated, the Soviets continued to claim that the threat continued and extended their seasons of murder. And even for the most coldly pragmatic, he also convincingly argues that the collectivization was an unmitigated economic disaster that killed incentive and left nearly barren a countryside that in the hands of an intelligent leader should have been turned into one of the most productive in the world. If one were to ask, what is the point of reading and recalling this hideous chapter in Russian and human history, one might just as well ask, why remember the Holocaust? While the circumstances of human history may change, the motivations that drive individuals remain quite consistent. Stalin, in the end, shrugged off the Marxist theory to which he professed he was committed in favor of the naked pursuit of power. Economic theory served as nothing more than a justification for the slaughter of millions of human beings. Leaders who in the future aspire to the kind of local and world power that Hitler and Stalin achieved will reveal their motivations to those who are vigilant, and it will be to humanity's great profit if those with sufficient awareness and foresight are able to thwart those efforts.
Rating:
Summary: Tragic truth
Review: Dr. Conquest's history of the Ukrainian famine is relentless and emotionally affecting. He indicts the regimes of Lenin and Stalin cogently, yet the prose never screeches with anger or outrage, and this forces home the facts all the more effectively. The first third of the book is at times frustrating, as Dr. Conquest tends to refer to a number of persons or incidences without providing any background for the uninformed reader, and the notes are rather poor, but this is a potent work of history and a superb indictment of not only the practitioners of communism in the Soviet Union, but also of the fatally flawed philosophy of communism itself.
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