The Harvest of Sorrow
Conquest, Robert
BOOK REVIEWS A t the height of the famine emergency in 1985, a few journalists sat around a restaurant table in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, considering analogies for the food crisis in...
...Because the Ukraine has never really been thought of as separate and distinct from Russia, the millions of deaths became—in Western eyes—an internal Soviet affair...
...And from their heads they made a meat jelly...
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...The modem mind, especially the minds of those who shape our modern memory, may be beyond redemption...
...I was reminded of the incident while reading Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine...
...history and culture, both the Ukraine and Eritrea are separate nations under the domination of Soviet Russia and Ethiopia—two nineteenth-century empires that have managed to retain their possessions throughout most of the twentieth century...
...In the mid-eighties, America gave hundreds of millions of dollars to help famine victims in Ethiopia...
...But what the book lacks in readability it more than makes up in its worth as a historical document...
...Though Stalin said the kulak must be destroyed, Conquest points out that by 1930, the kulak—someone belonging to a relatively wealthy peasant caste—had already ceased to exist...
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...It takes a strong stomach to read this book...
...Alas, today few young people would recognize my name, let alone know my work...
...My, what I would write today if only I could...
...Conquest, a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is forced to employ the vocabulary of the better-known Nazi holocaust in order to describe the magnitude of this one—depicting the Ukraine of fifty years ago as "one vast Belsen...
...That's why I would carry Crisis magazine with me everywhere...
...Though millions died, the author reminds us that "each unit among these millions was a person, and suffered an individual fate...
...But what saddens me is that the tradition I cherished, and tried so much to be part of, has often been forgotten along with me...
...Not so, the case with the kulaks...
...More people died as a result of dekulakization and collectivization than in all of the First World War...
...In Bil'ske [in the same province], Nastia Slipenko, a mother with three young children whose husband had been arrested, was shot by an armed guard while digging up kolkhoz potatoes by night...
...In both cases, the result was famine...
...The Party's rationale for this state of affairs was summarized in a 1934 novel: "Not one of them was guilty of anything...
...grounds .that famine would radicalize the masses, and commented: 'Psychologically, this talk of feeding the starving is nothing but an expression of the saccharine-sweet sentimentality so characteristic of our intelligentsia.' " Of the great holocausts of this century, none is more relevant in modern-political terms than the slaughter in the Ukraine...
...I fear, however, that Conquest's estimable work may be in vain...
...In Ethiopia, half a century later, a regime largely composed of ethnic Amharas used the same Stalinist agricultural principles to collectivize an Eritrean, Tigrean, and Oromo peasantry also burdened by centuries of feudalism...
...Mengistu Haile Mariam, once spoke to a group of Western visitors about the famine's cost in human and animal lives, as if one was not necessarily more important than the other...
...All there was were tough veins and muscles...
...What Stalin thought of as kulaks were really peasants only marginally less poor than their neighbors...
...Having logged many miles of travel in famine-stricken Ethiopia, I found that Conquest's account of the deportation of the kulaks and the resultant famine in the Ukraine between 1929 and 1933 gave me a chilling sense of deja vu...
...Incredible as it may be, the selective memory of the liberal West has so obscured this seminal event of twentieth-century history that the author is under the burden of proving that it actually happened...
...But Robin Knight of U.S...
...In 1921, crop requisitions by the new Communist government during a drought led to a famine in the Volga basin, claiming five million lives...
...Unfortunately, Conquest lacks Shirer's gift of narrative, which means this book is not going to be nearly as widely read...
...Over the early winter they ate all the remaining chickens and other animals...
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...but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything...
...Meanwhile, the West's failure to see Eritrea —and to a lesser extent, Tigre—as distinct entities within the Ethiopian empire caused the famine to be viewed purely as a sequel to drought, rather than as a combined sequel to drought and ethnic war...
...In both cases, the famine was used as a weapon against peoples whose nationalistic yearnings were never fully grasped by the Western public...
...Grain figures and other leaden paraphernalia are delved into...
...At least the Nazis knew who the Jews were...
...Churches were destroyed in the Ukraine...
...Nor have the methods employed to create it been repudiated, except as to inessentials...
...Several million of the famine victims were children...
...In the Soviet Union, a regime largely composed of ethnic Russians inflicted untried and theoretical principles of collectivized agriculture upon a Ukrainian peasantry burdened by centuries of feudalism...
...B ecause the class as a whole was guilty, children suffered the same fate as adults...
...America contributed $45 million to ease the suffering...
...More than twice as many Ukrainians and other nearby peoples died at the hands of Stalin than Jews at the hands of Hitler...
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...This benefited another hard-pressed Marxist regime, which, according to recent surveys commissioned by the Agency for International Development, is creating the necessary conditions foranother famine, by failing to reform its agricultural policies...
...T dwell on the similarities, between 1 these two tragedies not just because of what they imply about the present situation in Ethiopia—a far-off African country—but because of what they imply about the failure of modern memory, then and now...
...In both Ethiopia and the Soviet Union, collectivization was carried outagainst starving peasants by a well-fed militia, for which special food was transported into the countryside...
...The atrocities, which included cannibalism, are painstakingly listed, creating an aura of obscene monotony reminiscent of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...
...The aid helped buttress a shaky regime which survived to inflict an even greater loss of life a decade later...
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...The three children then starved to death...
...In another village in that province the son of a dispossessed peasant gleaning ears of corn in the kolkhoz field was beaten to death by the watchman "activist...
...By Conquest's "conservative" estimate, Stalin's terror claimed 14.5 million lives in the Ukraine: seven million as a result of famine, four million due to dekulakization, and 3.5 million due to deaths in prison...
...But as the author of this book notes, "what occurred [in the Ukraine] was all part of the normal political experience of the senior members of today's ruling group in the Kremlin...
...When I related to a colleague the stories told by Oromo refugees about collectivization in Ethiopia, he asked me, by way of justification: "Yes, but these Oromos, aren't they like kulaks...
...In everything except sheer numbers—more than ten times as many people died in the Ukraine—the two tragedies are strikingly similar...
...Thus the mass of statistics is brought down to earth with personal accounts: A woman seven months pregnant in Kharsyn village, Poltava Province, was caught THE HARVEST OF SORROW: SOVIET COLLECTIVIZATION AND THE TERROR FAMINE Robert Conquest/Oxford University Press/$19.95 Robert D. Kaplan 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 plucking spring wheat, and beaten with a board, dying soon afterwards...
...Ah, but I envy you...
...And the system then established in the countryside is part of the Soviet order as it exists today...
...During the 1891-92 famine on the Volga, Lenin refused to do relief work "on the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 DO YOU KNOW ME...
...In their Robert D. Kaplan, an Athens-based correspondent for ABC News and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is studying the African famine on a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Institute for Educational Affairs...
...Horse manure was eaten, partly because it contained whole grains of wheat...
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...This coldhearted attitude was an outgrowth not of Stalinism but of Leninism...
...Knight had no idea how prescient he was: as if on cue, in early 1986 came the first reports of a brutal campaign of relocation and collectivization against relatively prosperous Oromo peasants in the Hararghe region east of Addis Ababa...
...If I were you, I'd do it today...
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...The definition became so soft that villagers often used it as a pretext to settle scores against each other...
...The Kremlin kept figures for livestock mortality but not for human mortality...
...Both Stalin and Mengistu have—to use Conquest's own words`thought of genuine economic trends as obstacles to be overcome by the power of State decrees...
...Many of the so-called kulaks ("mortgagers" or "moneylenders") had less money or property than the Party officials who persecuted them...
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...Conquest writes that "Arthur Koestler saw from his train starving children who 'looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles.' " The Party activists referred to these little ones as "kulak bastards...
...It was hard to catch them too...
...According to the testimony of Oromo refugees, mosques were burned in Ethiopia...
...Nowhere else could I find such a lively collection of insightful commentary, crucial documentation, timely reviews, and brilliant essays...
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...There was a time when I was very well known among Catholics...
...I now have better things to do with my time than worry about my books...
...However, though dutifully reported in the world press at the time, the tragedy has never really registered in the consciousness of the West...
...BOOK REVIEWS A t the height of the famine emergency in 1985, a few journalists sat around a restaurant table in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, considering analogies for the food crisis in the Horn of Africa...
...The animals had become afraid of people and their eyes were wild...
...So many issues desperately need treatment from a Catholic perspective in the tradition of such giants as Acton and Maritain and, dare I say it, even me...
...Pages upon pages are therefore expended upon the extrapolation of death rates from census reports and other documents...
...First-hand accounts, many of which are redundant, abound...
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...39...
...The Ethiopian ruler, Lt...
...Of course Biafra and Cambodia came to mind...
...People boiled them...
...Thus, instead of a perpetrator of terror, the Marxist government in Addis Ababa became a mere victim of nature...
...The Nazis who persecuted the Jews and the Young 'Kirks who persecuted the Armenians are no longer in power...
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...You still have the chance to continue our tradition in such a vigorous age...
...Then they turned to dogs, and later cats...
...On the scales of human suffering, Stalin's assault on the Ukrainian peasantry is—World War II aside—the most significant and dreadful event of the twentieth century...
...News & World Report had the last word when he compared Ethiopia in the 1980s with the Soviet Union in the 1930s—at the start of the campaign against the kulaks...
...Yet some paragraphs are unforgettable: Yet another tells of a village . . . that "cattle died for lack of fodder, people ate bread made from nettles, biscuits made from one weed, porridge made from another...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
