Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.

    One of our foremost historians of Russia dramatically recounts the story of how the Russian people lived through the terrible gales of war and revolution that swept their land between 1914 and 1918; based on documents up to now inaccessible.

    Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. Zipperstein emphasizes Jewish acculturation: changes in behavior, attitude, and ideology as reflected in schools, synagogues, newspapers, and other institutions of the period. The patterns set then affected the community's cultural development well into the second decade of the twentieth century. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience.

    16 pages of photos.