Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

‘Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat’ (1,340 lives). ‘Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family’s… lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases’ (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman’s essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: ‘And the children’s faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads – thin, wide lips – and some of them resembled fish, mouths open’ (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on:

Thus: 11,860 lives. Cannibalism was widely practised – and widely punished. Not all these pitiable anthropophagi received the supreme penalty. In the late 1930s, 325 cannibals from the Ukraine were still serving life sentences in Baltic slave camps.

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