From 1987: Robert D. Kaplan on Robert Conquest

The great historian and long-time Hoover Institution scholar Robert Conquest died on Monday at 98. His definitive work on the Stalinist horror in Soviet Russia, The Great Terror, remains a companion to The Gulag Archipelago. But he also authored The Harvest of Sorrow, a groundbreaking study of Stalin’s famine war on the Ukraine in particular. It was reviewed in the April 1987 issue of The American Spectator by a rising major writer named Robert D. Kaplan. —Ed. At the height of the famine emergency in 1985, a few journalists sat around a restaurant table in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, considering analogies for the food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Of course Biafra and Cambodia came to mind. But Robin Knight of U.S. News & World Report had the last word when he compared Ethiopia in the 1980s with the Soviet Union in the 1930s—at the start of the campaign against the kulaks. Knight had no idea how prescient he was: as if on cue, in early 1986 came the first reports of a brutal campaign of relocation and collectivization against relatively prosperous Oromo peasants in the Hararghe region east of Addis Ababa. I was reminded of the incident while reading Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine [Oxford University Press]. Having logged many miles of travel in famine-stricken Ethiopia, I found that Conquest’s account of the deportation of the kulaks and the resultant famine in the Ukraine between 1929 and 1933 gave me a chilling sense of déjà vu. In everything except sheer numbers—more than ten times as many people died in the Ukraine—the two tragedies are strikingly similar. In the Soviet Union, a regime largely composed of ethnic Russians inflicted untried and theoretical principles of collectivized agriculture upon a Ukrainian peasantry burdened by centuries of feudalism. In Ethiopia, half a century later, a regime largely composed of ethnic Amharas used the same Stalinist agricultural principles to collec...