In the early 1930s, Boris Pasternak and other Russian writers were officially encouraged to visit some of the Soviet Union's quarter-million newly established collective farms. Several of the writers produced the expected screeds: they marveled at the revolution wrought in the countryside and heralded a new era of joyful collective labor.
Pasternak declined to join the chorus. "What I saw could not be expressed in words," Russia's greatest modern poet recalled in an unpublished memoir. "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What he had glimpsed was the consequences of Stalin's war against his country's peasantry, otherwise known as the collectivization of agriculture. Between 1929 and 1934, 20 million family farms had disappeared. So had the kulaks, who had worked many of them.
That was 50 years ago. Since then the true story has been told only in fragmentary fashion, as the facts filtered through decades of unrelenting Soviet denial. Fittingly, another poet, Robert Conquest, has now come forward to write The Harvest of Sorrow, the first major scholarly book on the horrors that struck Pasternak speechless. The author of five books of poetry, Conquest is no stranger to Stalinist atrocities, as witness his magisterial 1968 study, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. For Harvest he gathered a mass of scattered data, including testimony by survivors and participants, accounts by foreign witnesses and unpublished documents. From this welter of evidence he concludes that the peasants were hit by three separate blows.
Stalin, Conquest says, viewed the country's 120 million peasants as irremediably hostile to the regime. Individualistic and intractable, they would have to be torn from their bit of private land and either tamed by force or annihilated. Stalin's first target was the kulaks, caricatured as rich, greedy and brutal farmers who lived off the labor of others. Actually, they were the hardest working and the most productive of the peasants. The wealth of the average kulak family consisted of one to three cows and ten to 25 acres of land. Nevertheless, beginning in 1929, more than 13 million of them were "dekulakized," meaning deported, imprisoned or executed.
"From our village . . . the kulaks were driven out on foot," a writer recalls. "They took what they could carry on their backs: bedding, clothing. The mud was so deep it pulled the boots off their feet . . . They marched along in a column and looked back at their huts, and their bodies still held the warmth from their own stoves." They were then transported to the far north in locked cattle cars and sometimes on rafts along the great rivers flowing to the Arctic Ocean. The healthy adults were put to work in the mines or at timbering. The old, the sick and youngsters under 14 built shelters of wood and mud on patches of Arctic wasteland encircled with barbed wire. Some 6.5 million people died, more than half of them children.