Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. - book reviews

SUPPOSE that the July 1944 bomb plot had killed Adolf Hitler, which it surely would have done if Count von Stauffenberg had set his satchel a foot away from that concrete pillar. Hitler's successors swiftly round up and execute the plotters and then sue for peace, retaining control of much of Central Europe, with Scandinavia and the Low Countries remaining in National Socialist Germany's orbit.

Today, no doubt, the President of the United States would drink toasts at Summit conferences with aging Nazis, perhaps even including the nonagenarian Prisoner of Spandau, Rudolf Hess. By now some scholar surely would have dug out and published an account of the murder of nearly 6 million Jews during the Hitler era. But there would be many scoffers. Our scholar's interviews with survivors and quotations of published accounts would be challenged by reviewers who, after all, realize we must negotiate with this aging German totalitarian regime, since it boasts nuclear-tipped ICBMs aimed right at Greenwich Village.

Farfetched? Well, consider that when the Soviet Union announced the death on November 8, 1986, of the 96-year-old V. M. Molotov, premier of the Soviet Union during the 1930 - 33 collectivization campaign and number-two mass murderer after Stalin himself, his role in the greatest genocide of the century rated just six lines among the 62 column inches devoted to his obituary in the Washington Post, and about the same in the New York Times. Molotov was Stalin's right-hand man in the massacre by deportation and terror-famine of Russia's independent farmers. The total dead amounted to a very conservatively estimated 14.5 million, nearly two and a half times the toll of Hitler's Holocaust.

Now, at long last, the British poet-scholar Robert Conquest has provided a fine, thoroughly documented full-dress historical study of this genocidal campaign. Conquest grabs his reader at the start by explaining that he is describing the planned, deliberate murder of so many people that the total amounts to twenty dead for each letter, not word, in this 412-page tome. The Stalinists in their three-year war against the peasants killed more than all the dead on all sides in World War I. They turned an area larger than France, with more than 40 million people -- Ukraine -- into "one vast Belsen," where whole villages died of starvation under the supervision of well-fed police and Red activists. Only one Soviet leader has lifted a corner of the conspiracy of silence that still drapes the event: Nikita Khrushchev in Pravda in 1963 called it a "war of starvation" -- and within a year the surviving apparatchiks who had waged that war threw Nikita out on his ear. Nobody notices; yet compare the furor a year or two ago when a California crackpot denied the existence of the German Holocaust.

Here, briefly, is the history Conquest recounts:

By 1921, Lenin and his Bolsheviks had reduced Russia's industrial and agrarian workers to the point of starvation, and the Kronstadt revolt among the sailors, the shock troops of Lenin's 1917 coup d'etat, forced him to face reality. He announced a temporary retreat to a kind of free enterprise, the "New Economic Policy." But, in a secret letter not printed until 37 years later, he declared the retreat only temporary, adding: "It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror."

The Stalinists, after vanquishing first their Trotskyist rivals and then, by 1929, the Bukharinites, felt strong enough to renew their program of totalitarianization. These Stalinist survivors were fanatical millenarians whose rationale was that they would translate their utopian dream into a new and superior society. That such "true believers" could still truly believe, in the face of mountains of corpses, is difficult for Western pragmatists to accept, but it is true. A young American who worked on the English-language Moscow Daily News in 1933 told me some forty years later how he had confronted the paper's editor, Mikhail Borodin, about the reports of mass starvation resulting from the collectivization. "Without batting an eyelash he would look you straight in the eye and say, 'We have got to sacrifice this generation in order to build the future socialist utopia.' "

The Soviets' first step was to impose their "class war" theology on the countryside. Farmers and villagers had to be divided into "oppressors" and "oppressed." The Stalinists resurrected the pejorative label "kulak," which translates roughly into "shylock" and had applied to wealthier peasants in czarist times who lent money to needier farmers. Applied to the Russian countryside of 1929, this was a joke. The most prosperous peasants had at most two or three cows and 25 acres for an average family of seven, and earned only about 50 per cent more per capita than the poorest. They accounted for maybe 5 per cent of the peasant households and produced 20 per cent of the grain, Conquest estimates.

In the summer of 1929, a hundred thousand urban Communist activists were sent into the countryside to go after these "criminals," who were depicted as wealthy grain-hoarders holding back their harvest to starve the revolutionary regime. Stalin pumped his cadres up on a doctrinal fantasy that they were going to create great agricultural factories that would in two or three years yield "one of the richest granaries, if not the richest, in the whole world." But Stalin ordered: "It is wrong to admit the kulak into the collective farm because he is an accursed enemy of the collective-farm movement." On December 27, 1929, Stalin announced the goal of "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class."