The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

When Stalin began his ""revolution from above'' to collectivize Soviet agriculture, he was actually, as Conquest proves, launching a two-pronged attack: crushing the peasantry of the U.S.S.R. as a whole and destroying the Ukrainian nation. Between 1929 and 1932, millions of people were executed or deported to the Arctic in the drive to eliminate private farms. In the ensuing ``terror-famine,'' the Party set impossible grain quotas on Ukrainian farmers while waging an assault on Ukrainian cultural centers and churches. The story of this tragedy has not been fully told before, and Conquest (The Great Terror pieces it together from interviews with survivors, letters, testimony of Party activists and government documents. His powerful chronicle reveals for the first time the full dimensions of a campaign of state terror that, in all, claimed over 14 million lives, according to the author's convincing estimates. Nor does Conquest spare Western sympathizers like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who helped promote Stalin's myth of the existence of an exploitative class of rich, unpopular ``kulaks.'' (September)