The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest

Stanford, California Peter Wiles replies: (The precise real wage level in the towns is still, of course, a refractory calculation). The real income of the peasantry in the starvation areas was virtually nil. This is true: but these shops provided little more than a subsistence bread ration-though they did provide that. Then, he disputes my reporting a decline of the real wages of the urban worker in the early Thirties to 10 percent of its precollectivization level, on the grounds that if so they would have starved like the Ukrainian peasantry, while in fact state shops sold supplies cheaply. Two more points: Professor Wiles has me estimating the losses in the peasant insurrections of 1918–1921 as circa six million, which would indeed have been an exaggeration: in fact I say circa two million (of the five million deficit of males in 1926 as compared with pre-World War I, two million died in that war, and less than a million in the Civil War proper, which leaves some two million for the Peasant War). 249): and this should serve in a more rigorous approach. Danilov, in Arkheograficheskiy Ezhegodnik za 1968 god Moscow, 1970, p. I now find that the leading Soviet scholar of collectivization, in an obscure context not available to me when I wrote, makes it fifteen to sixteen million (V.P. My figures are based on what I rightly describe as a conservative estimate of the Soviet population shortfall between 19 of circa 13.5 million. It did not seem appropriate when dealing with what had, in the nature of things, to be no more than rough, round estimates. But, though he is indeed one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet economics and demography, his mild criticism of me for inadequate tabulation seems misplaced. It is splendid that my The Harvest of Sorrow so greatly pleased as acute, even acerbic, a critic as Peter Wiles.

The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest