![]() Cover of the first edition | |
Authors | Robert Conquest |
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Original title | The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine |
Language | English |
Subjects | Holodomor Soviet famine of 1932–1933 |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Publication date | 9 October 1986 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | 412 |
ISBN | 9780195051803 |
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is a 1986 book by British historian Robert Conquest published by the Oxford University Press. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who started doing research for the book following the advice of the director of the institute.[1] Conquest wrote the book in order "to register in the public consciousness of the West a knowledge of and feeling for major events, involving millions of people and millions of deaths, which took place within living memory."[2]
The book deals with the collectivization of agriculture in 1929–1931 in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's direction, and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and Holodomor which resulted. Millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps and execution. Conquest's thesis was characterized as "the famine was deliberately inflicted for ethnic reasons—it was done in order to undermine the Ukrainian nation", or that it constituted genocide.[3]: 70 [4]: 507
The Harvest of Sorrow won Conquest the Antonovych prize in 1987[5] and the Shevchenko National Prize in 1994.[6]
4. For examples of the genocide thesis, see Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, 323–330 ... .