The Harvest of Sorrow Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine [Hardcover]

The Harvest of Sorrowis the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled collective farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a terror-famine, inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.

Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written,The Harvest of Sorrowis a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.

Preface
Introduction

Part I. The Protagonists: Party, Peasants and Nation
1. The Peasants and the Party
2. The Ukrainian Nationality and Leninism
3. Revolution, Peasant War and Famines, 1917-1921
4. Stalemate, 1921-1927

Part II. To Crush the Peasantry
5. Collision Course, 1928-1929
6. The Fate of 'Kulaks'
7. Crash Collectivization and its Defeat, January-March 1930
8. The End of the Free Peasantry, 1930-1932
9. Central Asia and the Kazakh Tragedy
10. The Churches and the People

Part III. The Terror-Famine
11. Assault on the Ukraine
12. The Famine Rages
13. A Land Laid to Waste
14. Kuban, Don and Volga
15. Children
16. The Death Roll
17. The Record of the West