The War Against the Peasants the Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest; Oxford; 412 pages; $19.95

By Patricia Blake

In the early 1930s, Boris Pasternak and other Russian writers were officially encouraged to visit some of the Soviet Union's quarter-million newly established collective farms. Several of the writers produced the expected screeds: they marveled at the revolution wrought in the countryside and heralded a new era of joyful collective labor.

Pasternak declined to join the chorus. "What I saw could not be expressed in words," Russia's greatest modern poet recalled in an unpublished memoir. "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What he had glimpsed was the consequences of Stalin's war against his country's peasantry, otherwise known as the collectivization of agriculture. Between 1929 and 1934, 20 million family farms had disappeared. So had the kulaks, who had worked many of them.

That was 50 years ago. Since then the true story has been told only in fragmentary fashion, as the facts filtered through decades of unrelenting Soviet denial. Fittingly, another poet, Robert Conquest, has now come forward to write The Harvest of Sorrow, the first major scholarly book on the horrors that struck Pasternak speechless. The author of five books of poetry, Conquest is no stranger to Stalinist atrocities, as witness his magisterial 1968 study, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. For Harvest he gathered a mass of scattered data, including testimony by survivors and participants, accounts by foreign witnesses and unpublished documents. From this welter of evidence he concludes that the peasants were hit by three separate blows.

Stalin, Conquest says, viewed the country's 120 million peasants as irremediably hostile to the regime. Individualistic and intractable, they would have to be torn from their bit of private land and either tamed by force or annihilated. Stalin's first target was the kulaks, caricatured as rich, greedy and brutal farmers who lived off the labor of others. Actually, they were the hardest working and the most productive of the peasants. The wealth of the average kulak family consisted of one to three cows and ten to 25 acres of land. Nevertheless, beginning in 1929, more than 13 million of them were "dekulakized," meaning deported, imprisoned or executed.

"From our village . . . the kulaks were driven out on foot," a writer recalls. "They took what they could carry on their backs: bedding, clothing. The mud was so deep it pulled the boots off their feet . . . They marched along in a column and looked back at their huts, and their bodies still held the warmth from their own stoves." They were then transported to the far north in locked cattle cars and sometimes on rafts along the great rivers flowing to the Arctic Ocean. The healthy adults were put to work in the mines or at timbering. The old, the sick and youngsters under 14 built shelters of wood and mud on patches of Arctic wasteland encircled with barbed wire. Some 6.5 million people died, more than half of them children.

The second phase of the attack focused on peasant families who had not been categorized as kulaks. Deprived of their land and animals, they were hustled into collective farms by zealous Communist Party activists. Resistance was widespread. Babski bunty -- women's rebellions -- erupted among mothers who relied on the family cows to provide milk for their children. In some regions military aircraft were used to strafe villages in revolt. Peasants retaliated by slaughtering more than 40% of the nation's cattle. Tens of thousands of men and women were shot; one border police commander reported to the Politburo that the rivers were filled with bodies going downstream. Meanwhile, productivity plummeted; Soviet agriculture lay in ruins.

The final blow was the artificially induced famine of 1932-33. It was caused by Moscow's impossibly large requisitions of grain from the depleted farms, and it was maintained by preventing outside help from reaching the starving. No soup kitchens were set up, as they had been during the much less severe famines of the czarist era. Conquest argues that Stalin was aiming at the genocide of the Ukrainians, whose nationalist yearnings he despised and feared. The toll supports his view. Of the 7 million who died of hunger, 6 million were Ukrainians.

The accounts of the famine are excruciating to read. Arthur Koestler, then an ardent Communist, was traveling through the Ukraine by train. He recalls women outside his compartment window holding up babies who looked like "embryos out of alcohol bottles." For soup, people boiled rats, nettles, tree bark and the skin of old furs. While guarded warehouses nearby were filled with grain, peasants were beaten, arrested and even shot for trying to take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields of collective farms. In one village, families gathered acorns from under the snow and baked them into a sort of bread. A party official complained, "Look at the parasites! They went digging for acorns in the snow with their bare hands -- they'll do anything to get out of working." Villages became ghost towns, with families lying dead in every house. Conquest reckons that the final death toll from the entire war against the peasants was 14.5 million souls.

A symbol of the peasants' martyrdom was provided by a Christian Science Monitor correspondent who visited the Ukraine in 1933. On the road he noticed that an icon, hung in the traditional way at the entrance of a village, had been disfigured. The face of Christ had been obliterated; only the crown of thorns remained. The image may stand for all the innocents who perished on the Soviet land. Now, 50 years after they were effaced from memory, Conquest has succeeded in restoring their human faces.