The Harvest of Sorrow
  • Published: 15 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781847925671
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $49.99

The Harvest of Sorrow

Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Nov 2018
Tr. Paperback
15 Oct 2018
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Reissued alongside the fiftieth anniversary of The Great Terror, which revealed the truth of Stalin's purges, this equally ground-breaking book revealed the staggering human cost of Stalin's famines

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written.

More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War.

Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established ‘collective’ farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help.

With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin’s political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.
  • Published: 15 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781847925671
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $49.99
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About the author

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the Soviet Union. He came to international renown on publication of his ground-breaking history The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties in 1968, which revealed the true extent and nature Stalin’s political executions and imprisonments. As well as holding academic posts at various universities, including the London School of Economics, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was an acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and translator.

Also by Robert Conquest

The Great Terror
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Praise for The Harvest of Sorrow

This narrative is even more dreadfully surreal, more astoundingly alien, than that of The Great Terror

Martin Amis

Massive and devastating ... The Harvest of Sorrow reveals the truth about the dreadful years as fully and unflinchingly as Mr Conquest's The Great Terror presented it about Stalin's later crimes

The Times

Majestic ... The detachment of Conquest's telling adds to the story's horror and its effectiveness

Sunday Times

A harrowing story, told with great power and a wealth of detail

Evening Standard

The first thoroughgoing account of the tragedy ... heartrending

Telegraph

Essential reading for those who wish to understand the nature of the Soviet system

Wall Street Journal

It is to Robert Conquest's undying credit that he has at last brought this incredible story into the light of day

Spectator