The Harvest of Sorrow

Title: The Harvest of Sorrow – Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

Author: Robert Conquest

Publisher: The Bodley Head, 2018 (First published 1986)

ISBN: 9781847925671

Pages: 412

The first half of the twentieth century saw two authoritarian regimes in Europe massacring their own citizens on the basis of a flawed ideology. Hitler exterminated six million Jews while Lenin and Stalin ensured the deaths of about three times that figure. It is claimed that actions recorded in this book resulted in the loss of twenty human lives for each letter in it. The book begins its narrative with this sombre pointer in the preface. The author wades through available evidence to narrate the severe famine that raged in the USSR, especially in Ukraine and its environs, killing five million men, women and children in 1921-22 and another twelve million in 1930-37. Robert Conquest was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the Soviet Union. His books revealed the true extent and nature of Stalin’s political executions and imprisonments.

Communism always had an uneasy relationship with the peasantry. For them, the proletariat meant the urban industrial working class. Accommodation of farmers in the larger scheme of things was always a result of compromise in order to rope in the peasants in the class struggle. Marx had spoken of the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and praised capitalism for freeing much of the population from this idiocy. Khrushchev later told that ‘for Stalin, peasants were scum’. Small scale production in rural areas was understood to engender capitalism and Marx argued for ‘gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country’. The state of agriculture that was handed over to the Bolsheviks in 1917 was dismal, with only half of the peasant holdings having iron ploughs. Crop yield was only slightly higher than that of fourteenth century England. The Communist party identified slightly better off rural folk as kulaks and sought to destroy them under the label of class enemy. Some form of redistribution of arable land was made immediately after the revolution, but it was forcibly aggregated into huge farms during collectivisation. The party allowed one representative for every 25,000 workers, but in the case of peasants, 125000 of them had had to be on the rolls to deserve a representative.

Communism was an urban, industrial phenomenon in essence, but Russia was out and out an agricultural country. The Russian level of industrialisation and the size and maturity of the proletariat were insufficient to manage the transformation of a huge agrarian majority. This meant that farm surplus was heavily required for industrialisation. Though grain was always in short supply, USSR did not import grain till 1960s. The forced collection of grain paved the way for the devastating famine.

Stalin tried dekulakisation first in the countryside in 1929. Impossible quotas of grain were imposed on individuals and those deemed to be kulaks were inflicted crippling fines of up to five times the original quota,if they failed to meet it. Defaulters were transported to labour camps in distant Siberia which were designed more as a device to exterminate the class enemy rather than extracting labour from the unfortunate men. Kolkhozes, which were large collectivist agricultural factories, came next. But this could only make sense when the peasantry had adequate machinery and other goods from towns, which was not forthcoming. The urge to the giant farm had no basis except an urge to urbanise the countryside and produce the grain factories hypothesized by a German scholar (Marx) a couple of generations previously (p.109). Ideology, rather than sound economic advice, was the motive force of the Party. Economistshad the choice of supporting the Party’s new plans or going to prison.

This book vividly portrays the ways in which Communism dehumanised its workers and made obedience to commands from higher ups a virtue. The hunt against kulaks is a case in point. People who owned three or four cows and two or three horses were by definition kulaks. The average kulak’s income was often lower than that of the average rural official who was persecuting him as a representative of the wealthy class. Kulaks had already been greatly impoverished by the time of collectivisation. Even then, fanatic comrades virtually collected kulaks in their nets.They felt no compunction in separating family members by sending them to different camps. Communistsglossed over this human misery with heartless rhetoric such as “Moscow does not believe in tears”. Getting a kulak into jail was as simple as writing a denunciation such as the victim had paid people to work for him as hired hands. The Party’srationale was that even though not one of them was guilty of anything, they belonged to the class that was guilty of everything. Sometimes the people fought back. They sold or slaughtered and ate their cattle before entering the collective farms and letting the comrades take the cattle away.

Contrary to the lofty slogans frequently uttered by the Communists wherever they are not in power, the entire population of the Soviet Union were living in an open jail with no personal freedom or human rights.People needed internal passports to travel from one place to the other which had to be approved by the head of the kolkhoz in which they worked. Workers were paid by labour-days they had put in.This counted the actual hours they worked and not simply the time interval between the instant they came in to the work place and went out of it. A typical labour-day involved ploughing of a hectare of land or the threshing of a ton of grain. Naturally, some of the labourers had to work more than a day to get a day's worth of credit. Chairmen of kolkhozes and tractor drivers earned two labour-days for a day's work. The payment was a pittance. The workers obtained 300 grams of bread and some cash paid annually, which could not even buy a pair of shoes.

The great famine of 1932-33 was caused by fall inproduction and rise in requisition of grain. Conquest drives this point home with facts and figures. The requisition was based on biological yieldscalculated by the area sowedmultiplied by the estimated yield. Quantity of grain actually threshed was not taken into account. When famine raged, the officials rightfully suspected of secret hordes of grain. Starving people had their limbs swelled and the officials tracked and searched the homes of people with no visible signs of swelling. Instead of the hammer and sickle, a distended belly became the symbol of Communism for the time being. While people starved and died in the farmsteads, granaries bursting with grain were reserved for the army and city dwellers. Famine was just not sufficient a reason for release of grain. Party officials and their wives who had large rations would sell their surplus food in return for the starving peasants’ valuables at bargain prices.

This book is noted for explaining the frightful plight of the Soviet people under Communist party’s autocratic rule. Religious freedom was guaranteed in the Constitution on principle, but was regularly undermined. Moscow city had 460 orthodox churches before the revolution that came down to 100 by 1933. Churches were turned into cinemas, machine-parts stores, granaries and clubs. Church bells were melted to collect metal for Soviet industrialisation. Thirteenarchbishops died in Soviet prisons in the period 1928-38. The book includes an observation by Victor Kravchenko after he defected to the West. Henotes how families disintegrated on the face of merciless death:“The first who died were men. Later on, the children.And last of all, the women. But before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings”.

The author assumes that the readers are familiar with collective farms and how they were organised and functioned. We don't get any glimpses of information on this front. Some arguments are buttressed with quotes from fiction on the surmise that they reflected reality better than state records or people’s letters which were subject to strict censoring. Sholokhov’s books have been used much. It requires a hardened heart on the part of readers to cruise through chapters 12 (The Famine Rages) and 15 (Children). It is amusing to note that the author displays no hint of the impending collapse of communism in the USSR. This book was published in 1986, and just five years later, Communism was pushing up the daisies. But the author bows out with this remark:“in any future crisis of the USSR,it is clear that Ukrainian nationhood will be a factor and a vital one”(p.337). After five years, Ukraine indeed became an independent republic.

Rating: 3 Star