The Harvest of Sorrow

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.