Famine on Soviet farms

Press, 21 October 1989, Page 28

Famine on Soviet farms

The Harvest of Sorrow. By Robert Conquest. Macdonald, 1988. 412 pp. $24.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Greg Jackson) Back in the founding days of Animal Farm, Brers Lenin and Stalin kept tussling with a terrible tar-baby called the human soul. Surveying the embryonic outlines of the workers’ paradise nothing annoyed the duo quite as much as the intransigent individualism of the farmers. The founding fathers of the Soviet Union provided ample proof of the adage that to every problem there is a solution — quick, simple and wrong. The subtitle of this statisticians’ dream of a book is “Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine.” The essence of the solution cooked up by the Soviet leadership was simplicity itself — wherever pockets of resistance or nationalism popped up they simply confiscated the land and food, and starved the populace.

A good slice of the Russian peasantry obligingly died and those who survived were generally cowed into joining the agrarian looney bins that resulted from collectivisation. Grumbling portions of the burgeoning Soviet Empire such as the Ukraine came in for a particularly vicious application of this formula. Robert Conquest has done a superb job of dragging together the often elusive details of the Soviet collectivisation and the resulting famine in the late 19205. “The Harvest of Sorrow” is, perhaps, a dash too obsessed with detail and as a result the enormity of Stalin’s crimes becomes submerged in an abundance of statistical information. Still, this is a minor quibble about a theme that until recently both the Soviets and their apologists were loath to concede ever happened at all.