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Title: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0-19-505180-7 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Towering Achievement
Comment: Conquest's examination of Stalin's calamitous decision to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union is not an easy read, nor should it be. It is a worthy companion to the author's great work on Stalin's reign of terror in the '30s, and in fact serves as a "prequel" to the latter, having been published some 15 years later.
The great strength of the work lies in Conquest's meticulous efforts to explicate the roots of the communist regime's ruthless murder of millions of peasants. He details Marx's and, more importantly, Lenin's disdain for the peasantry, an underlying hatred that helps to explain Stalin's justification for departing from Lenin's pragmatic decision to embark on a "New Economic Policy" in 1921 that -- against his ideological bias -- offered new freedoms that spawned the despised class known as the Kulaks. Without this groundwork, one is tempted to dismiss the human destruction as the mere abberations of a sick mind.
Conquest makes abundantly clear that these supposedly fabulously wealthy farmers -- the Kulaks -- were in fact people of very modest means. Their greatest crime, of course, was that they obstinately resisted Stalin's determination that capitalism would be wiped from the countryside, whatever the cost. Much of the last half of the book recounts in stark detail the incredibly costly, but ultimately successful, effort to end peasant resistance to collectivization. Importantly, he points out, even after all realistic Kulak "resistance" had been eliminated, the Soviets continued to claim that the threat continued and extended their seasons of murder. And even for the most coldly pragmatic, he also convincingly argues that the collectivization was an unmitigated economic disaster that killed incentive and left nearly barren a countryside that in the hands of an intelligent leader should have been turned into one of the most productive in the world.
If one were to ask, what is the point of reading and recalling this hideous chapter in Russian and human history, one might just as well ask, why remember the Holocaust? While the circumstances of human history may change, the motivations that drive individuals remain quite consistent. Stalin, in the end, shrugged off the Marxist theory to which he professed he was committed in favor of the naked pursuit of power. Economic theory served as nothing more than a justification for the slaughter of millions of human beings. Leaders who in the future aspire to the kind of local and world power that Hitler and Stalin achieved will reveal their motivations to those who are vigilant, and it will be to humanity's great profit if those with sufficient awareness and foresight are able to thwart those efforts.
Rating: 5
Summary: The "Human" Face of Communism
Comment: We have heard so many excuses for the disaster that we call Soviet communism that one can almost recite them by heart - communism has never been tried, communism rescued citizens from the "tyanny" of the tsar (this is so pathetic as to be beyond laughable), communism had the wrong people, wrong methods, wrong country, blah, blah, blah.
Soviet collectivism is nowhere better illustrated than in the largest mass killing in the history of the world when over 14 million Ukranians were starved, shot and beaten to death by that "rescuing" crew - Lenin, Stalin & Company. This, of course, does not include the millions killed in the Civil War and the years directly afterwards. And if it were left up to Western intellectuals to highlight this holocaust we would still be waiting for news much less disapproval or blame.
Robert Conquest's tome reads like a documentary, describing a madness that one does not associate with civilized nations or people. But he is relentlessly systematic, the research and evidence overwhelming and mindnumbing. This methodical and studious approach is much more effective than anguished calls for revenge. Perhaps the magnitude of the event is too great to grasp for some, is so far beyond the pale that it surpasses the senses.
But that fact does not explain why even today the Soviet system has never come in for a tenth of the criticism of Nazi Germany despite committing five to six times the number of murders if over a longer time span. Worse, the regime had intellectual support in the West even after it's crimes were discovered - from the New York Times correspondent in Moscow to the usual bevy of college professors and "activists".
Conquest is measured but in this case the words and actions alone do not need shouting. In more poetic hands, this could have been a requiem - instead we have a lesson for the ages.
Rating: 5
Summary: Communism vs. Ukraine: 1-0
Comment: 19th-century Ukrainian peasants lived in serfdom that was so agriculturally inefficient that it was comparable to 14th-century England. But with the growing urban population the need for political and agricultural reform was recognized, and under the Tsar came the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs and the privatisation of communal holdings in 1906, so that they gained some degree of freedom. And as their lives improved, so did production.
Unfortunately, self-determination did not fit into Marxist theory. The intelligentsia felt only contempt for the peasantry, which it saw as an impediment to social progress. 9 million died when the peasants revolted against the Bolshevik coup in the 1918-1920 Peasant War.
Driven by their obsessive analysis of everything as 'bourgeois' or 'proletariat', the Bolsheviks set out to find class struggle in the countryside. Invention of the all-evil kulak farmer enabled them to perpetrate violence against anyone who might resist Soviet power-- in reality, anyone who was slightly more productive or who showed any kind of initiative. One individual who organized a fire-fight was 'exposed' as a kulak. More to the point, the infinitely malleable kulak allowed the Soviet government to perpetrate its war on Ukraine.
With typical Soviet planning, the Government requisitioned so much grain that none was left for seeding. As a result, the Great Famine of 1921-1922 took an astounding 5 million lives, far exceeding anything seen under the Tsar. Yet, American food aid was prevented from reaching starving Ukrainians and grain was even exported to Russia.
This could at least theoretically be attributed to sheer incompetence and stupidity. And in 1928, a market fluctuation misinterpreted by Marxist planners again led the State to requisitioning. But stealing the fruit of the peasants' labour obliterated any trust they might still have had in Communists and destroyed all incentive to work. Far from humbled by their first disastrous experience, the Soviet government set out on a bold experiment of to forcibly collectivise all private farming in one year. Showing abundance at least in hubris, Stalin's economist Strumilin: "Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws." The five year-plan rolled out in 1929 caused fantastic wastage, tens of thousands of tons of grain left rotting because of poorly planned distribution.
To perpetrate collectivisation, the Soviet government used all the methods of terror at its disposal. Arrest, blackmail, torture, deporation, exile, labor camps, and execution were applied routinely under the euphemistic denomination of 'dekulakization'. Children and wives were sentenced as "members of the family of a traitor to the motherland." A Soviet analysis calculated that at one point, 400,000 households had been dekulakized, 350,000 still remaining to be, and 250,000 households having 'self-dekulakized'. 1 million died in the collectivisation terror, and another 4 million in labor camps. One novelist wrote: "Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything."
Having robbed the villages of their most productive members and replacing them with urban sadists, agriculture totally collapsed. The kolkhoz itself proved economically disastrous having about one-sixth the productivity of an American farm. Farmers received one half pound of bread daily and a salary which enabled them to purchase a single pair of shoes at the end of the year. Tractors were unreliable and so scarce they had to be shared between farms a hundred miles apart. The cost of the terror infrastructure and massive bureaucracy meant there was not even an economic benefit to collectivisation.
The Government set grain prices so absurdly low that they didn't even cover costs. By multiplying total theoretical acreage with the maximum possible yield per acre, they set production quotas that in practice left nothing at all for next year's crop, let alone for food. Hungry and unable to work, fields were left uncultivated and crops spoiled.
Peasants were shot for trying to reach the gigantic quantities of grain left rotting in the open air or withheld 'in reserve', they were even shot for cutting corn from their own gardens. Ukrainians were prevented from reaching Russia, where food was plenty. Finally they gave in and did what Stalin asked them to: they died. Corpses were removed daily by the trainload to God knows where. Mothers went insane trying to starve their weaker children in order to save her others. Orphans were brought to the children's concentration camp in Kirovohrad to starve, then trucked out under the cover of night. Some kids were cultivated as NKVD interrogators.
The suffering described in this book is enough to drive anyone to tears.
The advantage of another 7 million dead Ukrainians was that Russians could be moved into their homes and begin the assault on Ukrainian nationalism. The kozbars, blind bards travelling through villages singing national songs, were invited to a congress where they were all executed. Skrypnyk was sentenced for introducing the soft 'L' and hard 'G' into the alphabet: the hard 'G' in particular had apparently aided 'wreckers'. Russian replaced Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and Ukrainian authors and linguists were almost entirely liquidated. Priests were dekulakized. Cossack stanitsas that put up strong resistance were deported wholesale, entire populations of tens of thousands.
Still, the Communists touted the success of their system to the world-- though the census figures needed a bit of fudging to hide the fact that a sizeable chunk of the population no longer existed.
The commentary and reporting of the likes of Walter Duranty of the New York Times or George Bernard Shaw are disgraceful. Duranty was described as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism." At least he got a Pulitzer out of it. I hope he chokes on it.
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Title: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0195071328 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 1991 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust by Miron Dolot, Adam Bruno Ulam ISBN: 0393304167 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1987 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Stalin: Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0140169539 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0393320863 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679761845 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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