Stalin and the Question of Soviet Genocide

Abstract

In the introduction to one of his classic works The Harvest of Sorrow, on collectivization and the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, Robert Conquest wrote: Fifty years ago, as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack, and other areas to the east—a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants—was like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbours. At the same time, (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.1