Robert Conquest, the British-born poet, master historian and political analyst, has entitled his minor masterpiece The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine. There is even no entry for genocide in the index of the book. Does he imply with Serbyn-Kravchenko and Chalk-Jonassohn that the Ukrainian famine had been either sui generis or an effort to "create terror"? Not really. At the very end of Chapter 13 "A land laid waste," there is a brief -- but somewhat inconclusive -- discussion of genocide, as defined by Articles I and II of the Genocide Convention, which Conquest cites in full without, however, analyzing what particular clauses apply to the Ukraine famine. Conquest then writes: "It certainly appears that a charge of genocide lies against the Soviet Union for its actions in the Ukraine. Such, at least, was the view of Professor Raphael Lemkin who drafted the Convention." The substantiating note is an account in The New York Times about a manifestation of Ukrainian-Americans in September 1953 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the famine, mentioning that Dr. Lemkin was a featured speaker at the gathering. Conquest continues in a somewhat puzzling vein, possibly anticipating the statement by Professor Marrus: "But whether these events are to be formally defined as genocide is scarcely the point [?]. It would hardly be denied that a crime had been committed against the Ukrainian nation; and whether in the execution cellars, the forced labor camps, or the starving villages, crime after crime against the millions of individuals forming that nation." The chapter ends with a part-ironical, part-polemical counterpoint: "The Large Soviet Encyclopaedia has an article on 'Genocide,' which it characterizes as an 'offshoot of decaying imperialism"' (Conquest, 1986, pp 272-273; emphasis added).
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