Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, the most visible fruit of the Harvard documentation project, a few months later. The book (like this one) was written in collaboration with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Conquest did not have the archives available today. But he worked with Mace to pull together the existing sources: official Soviet documents, memoirs, oral testimony of survivors in the diaspora. Harvest of Sorrow finally appeared in 1986 and was reviewed in all major British and American newspapers and in many academic journals—unprecedented, at the time, for a book about Ukraine. Many reviewers expressed astonishment that they knew so little about such a deadly tragedy. In The Times Literary Supplement the Soviet scholar Geoffrey Hosking was shocked to discover “just how much material has accumulated over the years, most of it perfectly accessible in British libraries”: “almost unbelievably, Dr. Conquest’s book is the first historical study of what must count as one of the greatest man-made horrors in a century full of them.” Frank Sysyn put it simply: “No book dealing with Ukraine had ever received such wide notice.”55