Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Year, readers have reacted to the choice with approval, surprise, bemusement and in some cases, even anger. Although the title is always conferred on the person or group of individuals who, for better or worse, has dominated the year's news, Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942) and the Ayatullah Khomeini (1979) drew a legion of indignant letters...
...unpublished memoir. "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What he had glimpsed was the consequences of Stalin's war against his country's peasantry, otherwise known as the collectivization of agriculture. Between 1929 and 1934, 20 million family farms had disappeared. So had the kulaks, who had worked many of them...
...another poet, Robert Conquest, has now come forward to write The Harvest of Sorrow, the first major scholarly book on the horrors that struck Pasternak speechless. The author of five books of poetry, Conquest is no stranger to Stalinist atrocities, as witness his magisterial 1968 study, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. For Harvest he gathered a mass of scattered data, including testimony by survivors and participants, accounts by foreign witnesses and unpublished documents. From this welter of evidence he concludes that the peasants were hit by three separate blows...
...Stalin, Conquest says, viewed the country's 120 million peasants as irremediably hostile to the regime. Individualistic and intractable, they would have to be torn from their bit of private land and either tamed by force or annihilated. Stalin's first target was the kulaks, caricatured as rich, greedy and brutal farmers who lived off the labor of others. Actually, they were the hardest working and the most productive of the peasants. The wealth of the average kulak family consisted of one to three cows and ten to 25 acres of land. Nevertheless, beginning in 1929, more than 13 million...
...caused by Moscow's impossibly large requisitions of grain from the depleted farms, and it was maintained by preventing outside help from reaching the starving. No soup kitchens were set up, as they had been during the much less severe famines of the czarist era. Conquest argues that Stalin was aiming at the genocide of the Ukrainians, whose nationalist yearnings he despised and feared. The toll supports his view. Of the 7 million who died of hunger, 6 million were Ukrainians...