Summary Of The Harvest Of Sorrow By Robert Conquest

British professor and historian Robert Conquest also brings his view on the topic in his book The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine published in 1986. Conquest has written many books on the Soviet Union and was in fact an open communist in England up until the Second World War started. His thesis is that the famine was purposeful and thus constitutes genocide. He says that Stalin wanted to subdue Ukrainian nationalism, and the way Stalin believed to do that was to kill the Ukrainian peasants, especially the Kulaks, and that the famine was meant to kill them. Conquest in his work on the famine brings multiple sources and interpretations of them. He uses some censuses, specifically the one from 1937 which he says shows the major difference in population in the Ukraine area in the years beforehand
Conquest also uses some Soviet studies from the 1960s that have some facts about the famine, and he uses articles from some newspapers that were written at this time (161). Conquest also uses many different personal accounts from people, mostly, accounts from anti-Soviets in Ukraine at the time (174), eyewitness accounts from people who fled the USSR (249), and interviews from the Harvard Research Interview Project. These accounts and interviews Conquest uses to thoroughly describe many of the atrocities of the famine and what the Soviets did to the peasants of Ukraine. They depict how high the quotas were set, how the Soviets came in and took any extra food mercilessly, how they killed anyone who opposed them, and vivid stories of people starving on the streets (287). They also