Collectivization In Robert Conquest's Book 'Harvest Of Sorrow'

The plan was to increasingly industrialize the Soviet Union in an unrealistically short period of time, using grain exports to pay for Western machinery. The major feature of the Five-Year plan was collectivization. Collectivization is the socialization of agriculture, ending private ownership of agricultural production. This meant that the class of private ownership, the Kulaks, no longer existed within the Soviet Union and would be liquidated as a class. In theory, collectivization would lead to more industrial workers in factories which the Soviet Union needed to industrialize; Soviet officials believed that collectivization would increase crop yields and help fund other programs. This led to food shortages and famine on a large scale which Stalin and his officials kept hidden during the famine at the cost of millions of additional lives that might have been saved had the famine not been covered up. …show more content…
In Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow, he explains the ghastly process of the Soviet Union concealing the starvation of millions of people. From the opposite view and now widely regarded as hate literature, Douglas Tottle's book Fraud, Famine and Fascism, he denies the tremendous loss of life and attributes the death of the Kulak class to their disobedience to the Kremlin. In Lynne Viola’s book Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, she blames the high death toll on peasants resisting the Kremlin, but only because they were resisting unfair policies placed on them by Stalin’s regime. Still others like Dr. Andrew Cairns, who in 1932 spent over four months traveling and studying agriculture in the Soviet Union, claimed that accusations of genocide in the Soviet Union were simply “propaganda about the terrible competitive menace of Bolshevik agriculture” produced by the