The Harvest of Sorrow in the context of "Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute"

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⭐ Core Definition: The Harvest of Sorrow

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is a 1986 book by British historian Robert Conquest published by the Oxford University Press. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who started doing research for the book following the advice of the director of the institute. Conquest wrote the book in order "to register in the public consciousness of the West a knowledge of and feeling for major events, involving millions of people and millions of deaths, which took place within living memory."

The book deals with the collectivization of agriculture in 1929 to 1931 in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's direction, and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and Holodomor which resulted. Millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps and execution. Conquest's thesis was characterized as "the famine was deliberately inflicted for ethnic reasons—it was done in order to undermine the Ukrainian nation", or that it constituted genocide.

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The Harvest of Sorrow in the context of Robert Conquest

George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG OBE FBA FRSL (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet and novelist. He was one of the West’s leading Sovietologists during the Cold War and was influential to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968); The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (1986); and Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.

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