The acclaimed poet's 8th collection. Now in his 95th year, Robert Conquest lets us in on the musings of Old Fred, a man reflecting on the battle of the sexes, and wholly impervious to notions of political correctness. The poems give witty exuberance to a mind at once resigned and optimistic, baffled and amused.

The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. 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.

Robert Conquest's The Great Terror is the book that revealed the horrors of Stalin's regime to the West. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. One of the most important books ever written about the Soviet Union, The Great Terror revealed to the West for the first time the true extent and nature Stalin's purges in the 1930s, in which around a million people were tortured and executed or sent to labour camps on political grounds. Its publication caused a widespread reassessment of Communism itself. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition gathers together the wealth of material added by the author in the decades following its first publication and features a new foreword by leading historian Anne Applebaum, explaining the continued relevance of this momentous period of history and of this classic account.

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written. More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War. Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established 'collective' farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help. With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin's political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.

Robert Conquest stresses poetry's relationship to the phenomenal universe--in particular to landscape, women, art, and war. His entirely individual poetic voice, varying from achieved lyrical sound and structure to other well-rendered forms and finish, gives us disturbing fictions, emotive landscapes, vivid erotica, off-beat humor, historical sufferings--and even odd demons, planets and philosophies.

The definitive work on Stalin's purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Harrison Salisbury called it "brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship." And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the former Soviet Union, where it is now considered the definitive account of the period.
When Conquest wrote the original volume, he relied heavily on unofficial sources. With the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material became available, and Conquest mined this enormous cache to write, in 1990, a substantially new edition of his classic work, adding enormously to the detail. Both a leading historian and a highly respected poet, Conquest blends profound research with evocative prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. He provides gripping accounts of everything from the three great "Moscow Trials," to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, life in the labor camps, and many other key matters.
On the fortieth anniversary of the first edition, in the light of further archival releases, and new material published in Moscow and elsewhere, it remains remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have continued to bear up. This volume, featuring a new preface by Conquest, rounds out the picture of this huge historical tragedy, further establishing the book as the key study of one of the twentieth centurys most lethal, and longest-misunderstood, offenses against humanity.

A leading scholar-historian of the U.S.S.R. offers a penetrating look at one of the most enigmatic and terrifying figures of modern times. Distilling a lifetime's study, Conquest provides a powerful, living portrait of Josef Stalin as child and student, revolutionary and Communist theoretician, political animal and paranoid leader. "A brisk, informative synthesis".--The Wall Street Journal.

In four highly critical sections, Professor Uri Ra'anan and his authoritative contributors analyze the state of Russia's power transfer crises throughout time. This collection takes aim at Russia's unpredictable leadership changes and consequent crises that result from the absence of a mechanism for legitimate succession. Contributors analyze this problem beginning with power struggles in the Kremlin immediately following Josef Stalin's death, and formalizing conclusions throughout Putin's ascent. Shedding new light on Russia's systematic flaw and resulting instability, this work is essential for practitioners and students of policy, especially as that country reemerges as an international power, and Putin shows disconcerting tendencies to revert to authoritarian and imperial habits.

In four highly critical sections, Professor Uri Ra'anan and his authoritative contributors analyze the state of Russia's power transfer crises throughout time. This collection takes aim at Russia's unpredictable leadership changes and consequent crises that result from the absence of a mechanism for legitimate succession. Contributors analyze this problem beginning with power struggles in the Kremlin immediately following Josef Stalin's death, and formalizing conclusions throughout Putin's ascent. Shedding new light on Russia's systematic flaw and resulting instability, this work is essential for practitioners and students of policy, especially as that country reemerges as an international power and Putin shows disconcerting tendencies to revert to authoritarian and imperial habits.

Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian." As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Winner of the Ingersoll Prize; winner of the Richard M. Weaver Prize; a New York Times Notable Book. "Provides many glowing embers of reasoned and wise argument." Richard Bernstein, The New York Times "A book that ought to be required reading for everyone about to enter college, and by every member of Congress." Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer"

The historical background, the present position, and the future prospects of both the non-Russian and Russian peoples are considered in their many aspects, as are the maneuvers of the Communist regime to suppress, appease, or make use of them. The future of the Soviet Union, and thus of the world, depends greatly on whether, and how, the Communist leadership, whose own ideology has lost most of its appeal, can adjust to a new surge of national feeling. The authors examine the question from many points of view, in a broad conspectus of political, cultural, economic, demographic, and other approaches.