Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR: dekulakisation, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families: and collectivisation, the effective abolition of private property in land and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in 'collective' farms under Party control. There followed a 'terror-famine', inflicted on the collectivised peasants of the Ukraine and certain other regions by the state, which set impossibly high quotas, removed every other source of food, and prevented outside help - even from other areas of the USSR - from reaching the starving millions. Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow tells the moving story of a disaster that was, in human terms, one of the worst in living memory.

Author Biography

Robert Conquest took his MA and D. Litt at Oxford University. Having held academic posts at various universities, including the London School of Economics and Columbia University, he is at present Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution , Stanford University. As well as poetry, criticism, fiction and translation, Robert conquest is the author of a number of works on Soviet themes, including the highly acclaimed The Great Terror, which is also available in Pimlico.