Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR: dekulakisation, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families; and collectivisation, the effective abolition of private property in land and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in 'collective' farms under Party control.

There followed a 'terror-famine', inflicted on the collectivised peasants of the Ukraine and certain other regions by the state, which set impossibly high quotas, removed every other source of food, and prevented outside help - even from other areas of the USSR - from reaching the starving millions. More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book that the total number of deaths from all the countries in the First World War.

Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow tells the moving story of a disaster that was, in human terms, one of the worst in living memory.