The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest

The author also emphasizes how this collectivization negatively impacted other areas of the Soviet Union. The author estimates that over 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine and millions more disappeared in the Gulag for dekulakization. The vast Ukrainian peasantry and its cultural elite had to be eradicated. Stalin also saw the Ukrainian nationality as a threat to the centralization of power in the Soviet Union. With the best farmers gone, with the produce seized by the government, with incompetent authorities in charge of the collectives – starvation set in. The remaining peasants were forced onto collectives where a major portion of the grain output was requisitioned by the state. This all lead to a loss of the most productive and industrious farmers and farmland – and the grain output kept decreasing to the stage where it was less than in the time of the Czars. More enemies had to be made when agricultural production sagged – so a class of sub-kulaks was found. Some were removed from their farms and sent to a remote Gulag to fend for themselves others shot outright. “We have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of liquidating the kulak as a class” So the kulaks needed to be eliminated they were enemies of the people. Under Marxism private property and enterprise was to be abolished. The definition of kulak varied – it could be a peasant farmer who owned a horse or two, a pig or two, who employed a labourer from time to time. The centerpiece is the treatment of the ethnic and farming communities in Ukraine during 1929 to 1934.īy following the dogma of Marxism-Leninism class war was declared on the so-called rich farmers of Ukraine labeled as kulaks. This is about one of the more appalling episodes in the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest