Harvest of Sorrow

Robert Conquest The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (Pimlico, 2002; first published 1986).

Published before the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union this study has (according to its 2002 Preface) been vindicated by subsequent access to the archives.

This is an excellent study. Conquest travels steadily and carefully through the available evidence to calculate numbers killed in the dekulakization and engineered famine (1930-1933) in the Ukraine and North Caucasus in particular. He arrives at a conservative estimate of 12 million killed in an act of genocide.

Conquest's style is somewhat stolid. But he is no blinkered accountant of death. He (unfashionably) quotes Schiller (p. 322): 'World History is the World's Court of Judgement' (his capitals) as he lays responsibility for this mass murder at the door of Stalin and those who carried out Stalin's wishes.

He also examines the role of the West - where accurate eye-witness information was available - and the ability of the Soviets to deny, dissemble and obfuscate and thus to avoid calumny. In the end, too many in the West heard what they wanted to believe:

"The scandal is not that they [intellectuals in the West] justified the Soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence." (p.321)

Conquest records acts of compassion that were uttely futile in the face of this tragedy - small attempts to rescue a child, or to give someone food for the day, often only revealed because the benefactor was caught and punished. Yet somehow these indications of the capacity for altruism seem so important simply because of the magnitude of evil all around.

And he has a chapter on children - starved, killed, turned into beggars, left to die, even eaten, and, sometimes, turned into the next generation of NKVD interrogators and torturers.

It is this destruction of the human soul of the living that Conquest finds to be the worst tragedy: the dehumanisation of those who implemented policies of mass murder, the capacity to kill in the name of historical necessity and the party, the punishment of small acts of kindness.

Nothing has since stopped mass murder. Torture is not uncommon. I guess there is only one lesson, if that's the right word: the only judges are historians, by which time its too late.