The Harvest of Sorrow

The Harvest of Sorrow

Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine

Summary

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written.

More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War.

Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established ‘collective’ farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help.

With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin’s political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.

Reviews

  • This narrative is even more dreadfully surreal, more astoundingly alien, than that of The Great Terror
    Martin Amis

About the author

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the Soviet Union. He came to international renown on publication of his ground-breaking history The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties in 1968, which revealed the true extent and nature Stalin’s political executions and imprisonments. As well as holding academic posts at various universities, including the London School of Economics, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was an acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and translator.
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