TESTIMONY OF DR. ROBERT CONQUEST

It is an honor to give testimony to your Commission. And I have been asked to say something of the historical perspective in which the famine took place.

The Soviet assault on the peasantry, and on the Ukrainian nation, in 1930-1933 was one of the largest and most devastating events in modern history. It was a tremendous human tragedy-with many more dead than in all countries together in World War I. It was a major economic disaster. And it was a social “revolution from above”, as Stalin put it, which wholly transformed a major country.

Yet these events have not to this day been fully registered in the Western conscious¬ness. There is a general knowledge here that some sort of catastrophe struck, or may have struck, the Soviet countryside, but little more. This minimum has percolated in over the decades, from eyewitnesses and victims; and more recently from the fact that almost every work by the many talented Soviet writers who have come (or whose unof¬ficial writings have come) to the West has at least a passing reference to the rural ter¬ror and its hideous consequences, taking for granted events which to them are part of a known background.

But the events are both complex and unfamiliar to westerners. The very concept of a peasant is strange to American and British ears. The Ukrainian nationality, sub¬jugated to be merely part of the Russian Empire for a century and a half, enjoying only a few years of precarious and interrupted independence after the revolution, and then again becoming merely part of the U.S.S.R., does not declare itself to the Western observer as the Polish or even the Latvian nations are able to. Even the Communist Party, its ideology and its motivations, is for us an alien and not easily un¬derstood phenomenon.

Then, the facts of the assault on the peasantry, and on the Ukrainian nationality, are complex. For it was a threefold blow: dekulakization meant the deportation of mil¬lions of peasants, collectivization meant the herding of the rest of them into collective farms, and in 1932-1933 the collectivized peasantry of the Ukraine and adjacent regions was crushed in a special operation by the seizure of the whole grain crop and the starvation of the villages. That is, we find no single, and simply describable and as¬similable, event, but a complicated sequence.

Most important of all, a great effort was put into denying or concealing the facts. Right from the start, when the truth came out from a variety of sources, the Stalinist assertion of a different story confused the issue: and some Western journalists and scholars were duped or suborned into supporting the Stalinist version. Nor have the Soviet authorities yet admitted, and abreacted, the facts. A recent novel published in the U.S.S.R, briefly describes the terror-famine, and later notes “in not a single textbook in contemporary history will you find the merest reference to 1933, the year marked by a terrible tragedy”.
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Lenin had devised, for a Marxist analysis of village life, a division of the peasantry into “kulaks”, “middle peasants”, and “poor peasants” plus a “village proletariat”. This implied a “class struggle” in the village which in fact failed to occur, but was thereupon