Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin waged a brutal war against the Soviet peasantry leading to the Holodomor, the terror-famine that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians during the fall and winter of 1932-33. Red Harvest is based on the tragic events that took place in Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1933. Stalin and the ruling Communist Party began their program of forced large-scale collectivization of individual farms and farmers, including the seizure of livestock, farm implements, crops, seed stock, and other property. Red Harvest is the fictional story, based on true stories as related to the Ukranian-Canadian author, of Mykola Kovalenko, a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, who was the only member of his family to have survived the famine. Through his memories, we witness the horrors of what happened to his family and fellow villagers in the “breadbasket of Europe” as they struggled—not only to make sense of the war that was being waged against them—but, ultimately, to survive.
