The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine.

• Author: Shipler, David K.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.

Robert Conquest. Oxford UniversityPress, $19.95 When future histories are written, the twentieth century may come to be known as the era of genocides. We have seen the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, the extermination of six million Jews in Europe by the Nazis, and the auto-genocide of perhaps two million Cambodians by their own rulers.

Although the terrible famine inthe Soviet Union in 1932-33 has been well known, it has usually been regarded as an inadvertent result of Stalin's forced collectivization. In his powerful, well-documented new work, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest makes a persuasive case that the famine was no accidental catastrophe, but a deliberate policy of class and national extermination directed by Stalin against the peasantry.

An estimated seven million diedof starvation, Conquest calculates: five million in the Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere. Another 6.5 million died from "dekulakization,' the brutal campaign against the kulaks, who were seen by Stalin and the party as an exploitative class of landowners, but whom Conquest portrays as simply the most industrious peasants--petty-bourgeois, but far from rich. The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class,' in the words of Stalin's order of 1927, involved executing some, imprisoning others, and deporting still others to remote areas of Siberia.

Those peasants who were leftwere the target of Stalin's mad conviction that grain was being withheld from the state. He ordered impossibly high quotas of grain from the...