Robert Conquest

Dr. George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born July 15 1917), British historian, became one of the best-known writers on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror.

Early career

Robert Conquest was born in Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of an American businessman and an Norwegian mother. His father served in an ambulance unit with the French Army in World War I, winning a Croix de Guerre in 1916. Conquest was educated at Winchester College, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor's and master's degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and his doctorate in Soviet history. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

In 1937, after his year studying at the University of Grenoble and traveling in Bulgaria, Conquest returned to Oxford and joined the Communist Party. Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee. These were the years of the Popular Front against fascism, when many western intellectuals were attracted to Communism. It was also the period of Stalin's purges, although few in the west were aware of this at the time. Conquest later made light of his commitment to Communism, but the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who knows Conquest well, says that he was a more serious Communist than he now admits.

When World War II broke out, Conquest joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (enlisting was a sign that he was out of sympathy with the then-Communist Party's "anti-war" line), and became, like many intellectuals, an intelligence officer. That a known Communist should have been allowed to join the intelligence service seems extraordinary in retrospect (considering that the UK was much more on guard for this sort of thing than many other nations), but the Army seems to have taken the view that the political skills of people like Conquest outweighed any possible security risk. Unlike similar figures like Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, Conquest was never known to have used his position to spy for the Soviet Union. In 1940, he married Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. In 1942, he was posted to the School of Slavonic Studies, where he studied Bulgarian for four months.

In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command. There, he met Tatiana Mihailova, who later became his second wife. At the end of the war, he was transferred to the diplomatic service and became the press officer at the British embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He witnessed the gradual rise of Soviet communism in the country, becoming completely disillusioned with communist ideas in the process. He left Bulgaria in 1948, helping Tatiana escape the new regime. Back in London, he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana. This marriage later broke down when Tatiana was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created for the purpose of combating communist influence and actively promoting anti-communist ideas, by fostering relationships with journalists, trade unions and other organizations. Conquest's time with the IRD has sparked some controversy, becoming a favorite topic of many critics (particularly on the political left) who claim that his later historical work was intentional anti-communist propaganda. Generally, these assertions are viewed with skepticism by other historians who have studied Conquest's work. Conquest is unapologetic about his work with the IRD, arguing that the organization was only responding to the aggressive actions of the Soviet Union.

In 1956, Conquest left the IRD and became a freelance writer and historian. In 1962-63, he was literary editor of The Spectator, but resigned when he found it interfered with his historical writing. His first books, Power and Politics in the USSR and Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, were published in 1960. In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a major figure in a prominent literary movement in the UK known as "The Movement", which included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He also published a science fiction novel and the first of five anthologies of science fiction he co-edited with Amis. His other early works on the Soviet Union included Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice, Industrial Workers in the USSR, Justice and the Legal System in the USSR and Agricultural Workers in the USSR.

The Great Terror

Main article: The Great Terror

In 1968, Conquest published what became his best-known, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939. The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the period 1956-64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census.

The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigori Zinoviev, who were executed after summary and faulty trials. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and had underlain books such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Conquest claimed that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges. By his estimates, Stalinist famines and purges had led to the deaths of 20 million people. Other accounts have put the figures higher and lower; for example, according to archival and demographic evidence examined by Alec Nove, there were 10-11 million excess deaths in the 1930s, while according to Norman Davies the number may approach 50 million for the whole Stalin period. In the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest has revised his estimate of Stalinist killings downwards from 20 million to 13-15 million.

Conquest criticized western intellectuals for "blindness" with respect to the Soviet Union, and argued that Stalinism was a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism, rather than an aberration from "true" communism. Conquest refused to accept the assertion made by Nikita Khrushchev, and supported by many Western leftists, that Joseph Stalin and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the "revolution" and were contrary to the principles of Leninism. Conquest argued that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme."

Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals for blindness towards the realities of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and in the 1960s. Figures such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain Rolland were accused of being dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime for various comments they had made denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges. Conquest's comment about the poet John Cornford, who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War and was a hero of the British intellectual Left, that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa," was widely quoted.

Some communists continue to deny the claims made in The Great Terror, despite their vindication by Russian and other historians following the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of some Soviet archives. In an attempt to discredit Conquest's work, communist writers call him an "anti-Soviet phony" in league with "Ukrainian Nationalist groups" and relying on "upon Nazi propaganda" for "so-called" evidence. One communist critic is Ludo Martens, whose book Another view of Stalin is available online.

Later works

In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, another exhaustively researched work, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin's direction in 1929-31, in which millions of peasants died of starvation or through deportation to labor camps. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was disintegrating, and access to first-hand accounts and archives in Russia and Ukraine was far easier. This meant that this book was more thoroughly based in archival sources than it was possible for The Great Terror to have been, and also that it attracted much less publicity, and certainly less hostile comment, than the earlier book.

In this book, Conquest was even more scathing about western left-wing intellectuals than he had been in The Great Terror. He accused them of denying the full scale of the famine, attacking their views as "an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale." He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: "Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act."

After the full opening of the Soviet archives in the later years of the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, Conquest was able to publish The Great Terror: A Reassessment, a consideration of his 1968 book in the light of newly available evidence. He concluded (as other post-Soviet scholars have done) that the account he had given of the purges was broadly correct, and that if anything the figures he had given for the loss of life during the Stalin years may have been an underestimate. When a revised edition of The Great Terror appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, Conquest was asked by his publisher to suggest a new title. Conquest allegedly replied, "How about 'I told you so, you fucking fools'?" In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Kingsley Amis, but Conquest calls it a "gem." Although some aspects of his work continue to be disputed by those on the left, no such dispute reaches the magnitude of the one during the 1960s, and he is often regarded as having been vindicated by history. Michael Ignatieff wrote in the New York Review of Books: "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure."

Conquest's most recent works are Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991), History, Humanity, and Truth (1993) and Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999), which may be seen as his summation of his career. In this last work he devotes more attention (in the section "The Great Error: Soviet Myths and Western Minds") to the attraction that totalitarian systems of thought seem to hold for many western intellectuals. He traces this attitude back to the Age of Reason and its culmination in the French Revolution. Even sympathetic reviewers, however, commented that Conquest's political philosophy was largely a re-hashing of the works of Friedrich von Hayek, and that Conquest's real strength was in empirical history. In 2004 he published The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, which continues in the vein of the above works.

Later life

In 1962, Conquest was divorced from his second wife and, in 1964, he married Caroleen MacFarlane. This marriage was dissolved in 1978 and, in 1979, he married Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a United States Air Force colonel. This marriage proved lasting. In 1981, Conquest moved to California to take up a post at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a traditional home of anti-Communist scholarship on Russia, and has lived there ever since.

Conquest is now senior research fellow and scholar-curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at the Hoover Institution. He is also an adjunct fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and a former research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. He is a member of the board of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies. He is a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Conquest has remained a British citizen and, in 1996, he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. His other awards and honors include the Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters and the Alexis de Tocqueville Award. Conquest has a substantial reputation as a poet. He has brought out six volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies, and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic Prussian Nights. He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1997. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and other journals.

In November 2005, Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush.

Acknowledgement

Much of the biographical material in this article is drawn from Andrew Brown, "Scourge and Poet, a profile of Robert Conquest," which appeared in The Guardian in February 2003 (see link below).

Historical works

(Dates shown are not necessarily the dates of first publication)

• Common Sense About Russia (1960)
• Power and Politics in the USSR (1960)
• Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960)
• Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961)
• Industrial Workers in the USSR (1967)
• Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (1967)
• Agricultural Workers in the USSR (1968)
• The Soviet Police System (1968)
• Religion in the USSR (1968)
• The Soviet Political System (1968)
• Justice and the Legal System in the USSR (1968)
• The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
• The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)
• Where Marx Went Wrong (1970)
• Lenin (1972)
• Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978)
• Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (1985)
• What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide (1985)
• The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
• Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989)
• Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)
• The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990)
• Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991)
• History, Humanity, and Truth (1993)
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
• The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History., W.W. Norton and Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2

External links

• Scourge and Poet, a profile of Robert Conquest
• Anti-Sovietchik No. 1, Christopher Hitchens, OpinionJournal.com, 3 February 2007
• Articles by and about Robert Conquest at the New York Review of Books
• Where Ignorance Isn't Bliss (Article by Robert Conquest at National Review Online)