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Famine or Genocide?
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11748 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1987 |
3,941 Words |
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Paul Robert Magosci
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THE HARVEST OF SORROW
Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
Robert Conquest
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
412 pp., $ 19.95
Robert Conquest's newest book, Harvest of Sorrow, is a profoundly disturbing experience. It is disturbing for what it says about the past; it is ominous for what it implies about the future. Even more sorrowfully, it continues to remind us that history is largely the record of mankind's inhumanity to men, women, and children. Readers will undoubtedly share the author's introductory sentiment when he says he found the subject so "distressing that he has sometimes hardly felt able to proceed." But proceed this reader did, and comment he must.
Conquest is no stranger to the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism as the graphic titles of some of his previous books attest - The Great Terror (1968), The Nation Killers (1970), and Kolyma: The Arctic Death Caps (1978). In Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest intends to document the collectivization of Soviet agriculture that began in 1929 and culminated in what he calls the "terror-famine" of 1933. The last event, he argues, was felt most devastatingly in the Ukraine.
But why the Ukraine? Anyone even slightly familiar with the geography of Eastern Europe knows that the Ukraine always had - and still has - a reputation as the breadbasket of the old Russian Empire and present-day Soviet Union. The grain and sugar beet abundance of the Ukraine's famed black earth not only could produce enough agricultural wealth to feed its own population, it also provided consistently high percentages of agricultural exports (in return for foreign currency) for the country's czarist Russian and Soviet rulers. Yet, in 1933, to quote a political activist sent to carry out the Soviet government's decrees, people in the Ukraine
were dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve.
The most terrifying sights were the little children, with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles....Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.
Indeed, the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union followed by a famine in the Soviet Ukraine and in neighboring areas has been known since the terrible events occurred in the early 1930s. Since the 1960s, textbook histories of Russia and the Soviet Union have taught thousands of North American college students the basic facts. According to the widely used text written by Nicholas Riasanovsky, "[in 1933] a frightful famine swept the Ukraine." Basil Dmytryshyn repeats this refrain and alludes as well to its causes:
Strict enforcement of this decree (declaring peasants criminally responsible for destroying their own agricultural property and crops before joining a collective), coupled with the forcible collection of high [grain] levies, produced a man-made famine. The areas most affected were the
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