Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Harvest of Sorrow would eventually find an echo inside Ukraine itself, although the authorities tried to block it. Just as the Harvard research project was launching in 1981, a delegation from the UN Mission of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic visited the university and asked the Ukrainian Research Institute to abandon the project. In exchange, the Institute was offered access to Soviet archives, a great rarity at the time. Harvard refused. After excerpts from Conquest’s book appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the first secretary to the Soviet Embassy wrote an angry letter to the editor: Yes, some had starved, he claimed, but they were the victims of drought and kulak sabotage.57 Once the book was published, it proved impossible to keep it away from Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1986 it was read aloud on Radio Liberty, the American-backed, Munich-based radio station, to its listeners inside the USSR.