Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust
Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust(1984) During the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was held up, by some, as a viable alternative to such Western democracies as the United States and Great Britain. A crushing Stalinist censorship suppressed and distorted what the West was hearing about the ‘great Soviet experiment.’
Some information leaked out about purges and gulags, though this tended to be discredited by Soviet enthusiasts. Contrasted to America’s economic doldrums, the Soviet economy was often presented as a shining contrast. One element that was missing from this economic equation was the human cost. A vivid example of this cost was the Stalin-ordered Ukrainian "terror famine" that resulted in up-to-7,000,000 deaths. The Ukraine was the granary of the Soviet Union. In order to get hard currency to purchase industrial equipment, the military ruthless seized food, including seed grain, from throughout the Ukraine.
This remarkable documentary captures this inhuman story, including the mass starvation that resulted .Historical footnote: Moscow-based, New York Times' Pulitzer-winner Walter Duranty characterized this well-documented genocide as "mostly bunk." An authoritative account of this horror is included in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997), compiled by a group of French scholars.
