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==The book== |
==The book== |
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| ⚫ | The book was written with the assistance of historian [[James Mace]], a junior fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, who, following the advice of the director of the Institute, started doing research for Robert Conquest’s book.<ref name="Mace 1">{{cite web|last1=VLAD|first1=Mariya|title=James Mace, a Native American with Ukrainian blood|url=http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20083/84|website=wumag.kiev.ua|publisher=Welcome to Ukraine (WU Magazine)|accessdate=9 October 2015}}</ref> |
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In 1981, the [[Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute|Ukrainian Research Institute]] approached Conquest with a major project: a book on the 1932-33 famine. The pot was sweetened by an $80,000 subside from the [[Ukrainian National Association]], a New Jersey-based group with a venerable, hard-right tradition; the [[Ukrainian National Association|UNA]]'s newspaper, [[Svoboda (newspaper)|Svoboda]], was banned by Canada during World War II for its pro-German sympathies.<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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| ⚫ | The |
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| ⚫ | In 1986, Conquest published the book dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in [[Ukraine]] and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the 1932-33 famine, in which millions of peasants died due to [[starvation]], [[deportation]] to [[labor camp]]s, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the [[Ukrainian famine|famine]] was a planned act of genocide.<ref name="Telegraph">{{cite web|url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11782719/Robert-Conquest-historian-obituary.html|title=Robert Conquest – Historian – Obituary|publisher=Telegraph.uk|accessdate=4 August 2015}}</ref> |
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Conquest, accepting this sponsorship, looked somehow in the pocket of the Ukrainians.<ref name="LA Times">{{cite news|last1=HILLIER|first1=BEVIS|title=Harvest' of Soviet Terrorism Reaped by Historian Conquest|url=http://articles.latimes.com/1986-11-19/news/vw-4241_1_soviet-union|accessdate=4 October 2015|agency=LA Times|publisher=latimes.com|date=19 November 1986}}</ref> For this reason he replied: |
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<blockquote>"I did not do the book specifically on the Ukraine. About half the book is on the non-Ukrainian side, the rest of the Soviet peasantry--there is a whole chapter on the Kazakhs, for example. The sponsors made no attempt whatever to suggest what I should write. In fact I'm in trouble with some of them for refusing to drop the 'the' from 'the Ukraine.'" |
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<ref name="LA Times"/></blockquote> |
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U.S. Congress promoted awareness of the "[[Holodomor]]" and set a Congressional Commission on the Ukraine famine, which was authorized in 1985 and headed by [[James Mace]].<ref name="wikileaks 1"/> The Commission conducted archival and oral history research, under a $382,000 congressional appropriation,<ref name="The Village Voice"/> leading to a final report conclusion in 1988 that: "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-33." Mace's research formed the basis for Robert Conquest's book ''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine''.<ref name="wikileaks 1">{{cite web|last1=U.S. Embassy Ukraine Kyiv|title=UKRAINE: THE HOLODOMOR AND THE POLITICS OF REMEMBRANCE: THE LEGACY OF STALIN'S 1932-33 FAMINE, 2006 November 30|url=https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KYIV4414_a.html|website=wikileaks.org|publisher=Wikileaks PLUSD|accessdate=9 October 2015}}</ref><ref name="The Village Voice"/> For Mace's wife Nataliya Dzyubenko-Mace, the US Commission was instrumental in alerting the American public and politicians to these horrific crimes, helping rouse American society from “political lethargy”.<ref name="Mace 1"/> |
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| ⚫ | In 1986, Conquest published the |
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"The Harvest of Sorrow" had a clear moral: that if the older Soviet leaders were direct accomplices in an artificially contrived famine, and the younger leaders today still justify such procedure, then it followed that they might be willing to kill tens of millions of foreigners or suffer a loss of millions of their own subjects in a war.<ref name="LA Times"/> Conquest said: |
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<blockquote>"I don't think they want to blow Western populations to pieces. But if they came to America and imposed the collective farm system, then they might well organize a famine."<ref name="LA Times"/></blockquote> |
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===Criticism=== |
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In a controversial 1988 article in ''[[The Village Voice]]'', American investigative journalist [[Jeff Coplon]] analyzed the scholarship surrounding the [[Ukrainian famine]] of the 1930s, and argued that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Robert Conquest, of [[genocide]] against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community. |
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<ref name="The Village Voice">{{Cite news|first=Jeff |last=Coplon |work=[[Village Voice]] |location=New York|date=January 12, 1988 |url=http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html |title=In Search of a Soviet Holocaust|publisher=villagevoice.com|accessdate=18 September 2015 }}</ref> In a letter to the editors, Robert Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity".<ref>{{Cite news|first=Robert |last=Conquest |work=The Ukrainian Weekly |location=|date=February 21, 1988 |title=Letters to the editors |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/16317836/The-Ukrainian-Weekly-198808 }} – Reprinted by the ''[[The Ukrainian Weekly]]'', February 21, 1988</ref> |
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In the same article Coplon accused Conquest of misusing the sources: |
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"[Conquest] weaves his terror-famine from unverifiable (and notoriously biased) èmigrè accounts. [...] ''Black Deeds of the Kremlin'', a period piece published by Ukrainian èmigrès in 1953, is footnoted no less than 145 times. |
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Conquest can be deftly selective when it suits his purpose. He borrows heavily from [[Lev Kopelev]]'s ''The Education of a True Believer'', but ignores Kopelev when the latter recalls Ukrainian villages that were relatively untouched by famine, or relief efforts by a Communist village council."<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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The same article reports opinions of expert Sovietologists rejecting "Conquest's hunt for a new holocaust". The famine was a terrible thing, they agree, but it decidedly was not genocide. They point out that the 1932-33 famine was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached deep into the [[Chernozem|Black Earth]] [[Central Black Earth Region|region of central Russia]]. They note that [[Stalin]] had far less control over collectivization than is widely assumed, and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they went along.<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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<blockquote> |
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"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said [[Alexander Dallin]] of [[Stanford University|Stanford]], the father of modern [[Sovietology]]. "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense." |
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"This is crap, rubbish," said [[Moshe Lewin]] of the [[University of Pennsylvania]], whose ''Russian Peasants and Soviet Power'' broke new ground in social history. "I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology." |
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"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of [[SUNY-Binghamton]], the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?" |
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"He's terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of [[Boston College]]. "He misuses sources, he twists everything."<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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</blockquote> |
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Also Coplon put attention on the fact that: |
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"In the latest [1988] catalogue for the [[Noontide Press]], a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist [[Willis Carto]], ''The Harvest of Sorrow'' is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as ''The Auschwitz Myth'' and ''Hitler At My Side''. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: "The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real '[[Holocaust]]' might compete with a [[Holohoax]]." With the term "Holohoax" referring to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews. |
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As observed by [[Eli Rosenbaum]], who was general counsel for the [[World Jewish Congress]]: "they're always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million. It makes the reader think: `My god it's worse than the Holocaust.'"<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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Coplon argues that Conquest fixes on seven million famine deaths, including six million Ukrainians, with no appendix to show how his numbers are derived. |
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Sergei Maksudov, a Soviet èmigrè scholar much cited by Conquest, concluded that the famine caused 3.5 million premature deaths in the Ukraine—700,000 from starvation, and the rest from diseases "stimulated" by malnutrition.<ref name="The Village Voice"/> |
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Writing in [[Slavic Review]], demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver maintained that limited census data make a precise famine death count impossible. Instead, they offer a probable range of 3.2 to 5.5 million "excess deaths" for the entire Soviet Union from 1926 to 1939—a period that covers collectivization, the civil war in the countryside, the purges of the late `30s, and major epidemics of typhus and malaria. According to these experts, and Maksudov as well, Conquest made the most primitive of errors: He overestimated fertility rates and underrated the impact of assimilation, through which many Ukrainians were "redesignated" as Russians in the 1939 census. As a result, the cold warriors confuse population deficits (which included unborn children) with excess deaths.<ref name="The Village Voice"/><ref name="B. Anderson">{{cite journal |title=Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR |author=Barbara Anderson |author2=Brian Silver |journal=Slavic Review |volume=44 |issue=No.3 Autumn, 1985 |date= |pages=517–519 |jstor=2498020 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2498020 |doi=10.2307/2498020}}</ref> |
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In 1987 [[J. Arch Getty]] wrote on '[[The London Review of Books]]': |
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<blockquote> |
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"Conquest’s hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the [[American Enterprise Institute]]. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. [...] Conquest’s book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today’s conservative political climate, with its ‘[[evil empire]]’ discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular." |
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<ref name="Getty LRB 1987">{{cite journal|last1=Getty|first1=J. Arch|title=Starving the Ukraine|journal=The London Review of Books|date=22 January 1987|volume=9|issue=No. 2|pages=7-8|url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n02/j-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine|accessdate=24 September 2015}}</ref> |
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</blockquote> |
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In the same article J. Arch Getty shows his interpretation of facts, denying that famine was intentional from Stalin or planned whatsover: |
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<blockquote> |
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"Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. [...] These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist ‘Stalin Revolution’ which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups. [...] |
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The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence."<ref name="Getty LRB 1987"/></blockquote> |
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Certainly Stalin and the Politburo played major roles, Getty says, but "there is plenty of blame to go around. It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest." |
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<ref name="Getty blame">{{cite web|last1=Getty|first1=J. Arch|url=https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/vv.html|accessdate=24 September 2015}}</ref> |
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==References== |
==References== |
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Revision as of 16:50, 21 October 2015
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1986.
The book
The book was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, who, following the advice of the director of the Institute, started doing research for Robert Conquest’s book.[1]
In 1986, Conquest published the book dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the 1932-33 famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide.[2]
References
- ^ VLAD, Mariya. "James Mace, a Native American with Ukrainian blood". wumag.kiev.ua. Welcome to Ukraine (WU Magazine). Retrieved 9 October 2015.
- ^ "Robert Conquest – Historian – Obituary". Telegraph.uk. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
- Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine, Oxford University Press, 1986, ISBN 0195051807