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Summary: The Economic Statistical Facts of Communist Russia
Review: Harvest of Sorrow is an important book for any age. Meticulous, rich with history, but refreshingly unemotional, 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.We were so moved by this book and another timeless classic - The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek that we also felt compelled to create a web page just for these type of books because we feel that many people may not yet have a clear understanding of what communism is (and was)all about. From what we've learned here, we have to say we "thought" we knew, but found we didn't have the actual bottom line until we'd digested this material.
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Summary: History writing at its very best
Review: I did not believe Eastern European friends and dissidents who told me 20 years ago about the mass murder by starvation, deportation, and shooting of the Ukrainian peasantry in the 1930ies. This thoroughly researched and exceptionally well written book removes all doubts. The book exposes both the extensive scale of the genocide (many million dead) and western complacency. It surprises that this major event in European affairs is largely absent from past and present western consciousness. This book is hard to put down as it combines excellent writing with a gripping if true and gruesome story. Conquest gives the men, women, and children that vanished a loud and clear voice without loosing sight of the larger political context. He demonstrates the deadly consequences of individual actions and individual inactions that killed the farmers of the Ukrainian "bread basket." The story has a chilling echo in more recent events in Rwanda, Kosovo, China, and North-Korea.
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Summary: Excellent Account Stalin's Purges in the Ukraine
Review: I first picked up this book for a report in a Russian History Class in college. Although it has been a few years that I have read this book, many of the facts and descriptions still linger in my mind. The book depicts the pain suffering and death of countless people as well as the actions of those in power leading to the farmers' plight. An excellent book, even for those who are not historians.
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Summary: The Hidden Holocaust
Review: I had heard a little from Ukrainian friends about these horrible and diabolical events of the late 20s, and early 30s in Ukraine but NOTHING prepared me for the vast extent of the Atrocity of the century (yes - in due respect to the Jewish people, I am rating this event as even worse than the Shoah, for numerical reasons primarily. I am certainly not discounting Hitler's atrocity against your people). Conquest relates the events in all their starkness and horror. The weaknesss of Western Governments to do anything at all leaves one disgusted. I am frequently staggered by Communists frequently demanding that certain alleged Nazi war criminals be brought to justice - so they should be - but totalitarianism is always the same, whether from the right or left, and Communism, as Conquest demonstrates, has more than its fair share of blood on its hands. This story MUST be told and retold. The world must know. I congratulate the author for having the courage to go into print in the face of virulent left wing lying propaganda.
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Summary: Painful reading
Review: I have finally stumbled on a book that has the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide by Stalin as its main topic. For me this is a painful topic as I myself am a Ukrainian having to cope with this most unpleasant lowpoint of Ukrainian history. Soviet apologists continuously deny the famine's existence yet they can not account for Ukraine's huge population loss before World War II, i.e. Soviet Ukraine occupied before 1939. This event which occured in the course of a year, 1932-1933 is perhaps the most concentrated genocide as it has deaths exceeding the Holocaust in the space of a year. What painful deaths these Ukrainians suffered and what degradation Ukraine went through is staggering
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Summary: The Horror and Futility of It All
Review: 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.
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Summary: Grim going.
Review: Much is still said about the Nazi houlocaust, and well that it should be. Little seems to be said about the millions that Stalin and his fellow garbage starved and shot to death in the late 1920's, particularly in the Ukraine. This book ought to be on the reading list of every high school student. Things like this need to be put out in the open and remembered. It wasn't too many years ago that western liberals were excusing the soviets behavior all over the place, and pretending that things like this never happened.
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Summary: Disturbing
Review: Robert Conquest at his best, chronicling a deeply harrowing tragedy. What I find most disturbing about the Terror-Famine is that the gruesome details are still relatively unknown. There are literally only a hand-full of books on the subject, notably Moshe Lewin, Miron Dolot, and Conquest himself. Compare this to the copious writings on the Two Wars and the Holocaust. I Stongly recommend this book, and Conquest's other masterpiece 'The Great Terror', as not only superbly researched history but also a warning against the dangerous fallacy of the Utopian State.
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Summary: Power is not a means, it is an end
Review: Robert Conquest characterizes rightly the Ukranian genocide perpetrated by the CP under Stalin as 'one of the most dreadful periods of modern times'. (A. Koestler: 'starving children looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles'.)
He clearly explains the reader that it was an ideological as well as a political scheme; ideological, because it aimed at replacing private agriculture (the kulaks) by collective farms; political, because it aimed at crushing the Ukranian minority. The result was about 15 million deaths through deportation, starvation or direct liquidation.
This book contains excellent historical, political and ideological (Marx, Engels) background on the collectivization problem which would haunt the USSR until his final days: bureaucratization and rampant inefficiency.
Robert Conquest's book gives us an appalling picture of Lenin's terror reign and, after his death, of the power struggle at the top of the CP. The outcome was that one man through one party wielded totally uncontrolled power in an enormous country. He had even the power to inflict genocides without having to justify himself.
This book shows the USSR as a ghost state (reflected in the media) where all contact with reality was lost, as so brilliantly described in Ismail Kadare's novels. For the bureaucrats terror and obedience to any order from above became a normal method of administration.
When one ultimately askes why and how all those, humanly speaking, devastating facts could happen, I should remind the last words of Prof. David Chandler's magisterial book on Pol Pot's death camp 'Voices from S-21': 'the real truth ... is to be found in ourselves'.
The Ukranian genocide is not unique in the 20th century with its Nazi camps, Indonesian, Rwandan, Armenian or Bosnian mass killings.
A terrible but necessary book.
I should also recommend a prime eye-witness of this tragedy: Miron Dolot's 'The Hidden Holocaust'.
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Summary: the hidden holocaust
Review: robert conquest did a thorough research prior to presenting the facts of the " hidden holocaust", when 7 million innocent Ukrainian men, women and children died from the artificial famine orchestrated by Moscow in 1932-1933 by such evil men as Kaganovich, Krushchev, et al. This holocaust was denied by such papers as New York Times correspondent in Moscow ( Durante). Excellent work for a researcher in human tragedies.
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