Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born
July 15, 1917) is a British historian
who became a well-known writer and
researcher on the Soviet Union with the
publication in 1968 of The Great Terror,
an account of Stalin's purges of the
1930s.
Early career
Robert Conquest was born in Malvern,
Worcestershire, the son of an American
businessman and a 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 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.
When World War II broke out, Conquest
joined the Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and
became an intelligence officer. In 1940,
he married Joan Watkins, with whom he
had two sons. In 1942, he was posted to
the School of Slavonic and East European
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. In 1956, Conquest left
the IRD and became a freelance writer
and historian. Some of his books were
partly distributed through Praeger
Press, a US company which published a
number of books at the request of the
CIA.[1] 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. 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.
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.
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 Grigory Zinoviev, who were executed
after summary show 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
states:
"Exact numbers may never be known
with complete certainty, but the total
of deaths caused by the whole range of
Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be
lower than some fifteen 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 accused 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 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.
After the opening up of the Soviet
archives in 1991, detailed, unedited
information has been released that
contest Conquest's claims heavily.
Contested is the duration of sentences,
the "political" criteria for prisoners,
the ethnic makeup, and total the number
of prisoners, which has been revised
down to a more realistic number.
Later works
In 1986, Conquest published The
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet
Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine,
dealing with the Holodomor, the famine
in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR
resulting from 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.
In this book, Conquest was even more
critical of 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 partial 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.
One of Conquest's recent works was
Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
where he describes 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.
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. In
1981, Conquest moved to California to
take up a post at the Hoover Institution
at Stanford University.
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 Richard Weaver Award for
Scholarly Letters, the Alexis de
Tocqueville Award, and selection by the
National Endowment for the Humanities to
deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in
the Humanities. In 1994 he was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy.Conquest
is also known 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 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. In June 2006,
he was awarded the Ukrainian
Presidential Medal of Yaroslav the Wise,
the highest honor bestowed by Ukraine,
in recognition of his scholarship on the
Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of
1932-1933).
