Robert Conquest
Encyclopedia
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG
(born 15 July 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. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University
's Hoover Institution
.
, 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
, being awarded the 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. 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 journalist
s, trade union
s 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. 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.
, 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
émigré
s and exile
s 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:
Conquest criticized western intellectual
s 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 did not 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
, Bertold Brecht and Romain Rolland
of being apologists for Stalinism.
After the Glastnost era of the 1980s released much information from Soviet archives, Conquest argued that the new information supported his arguments. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and revise The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. The new version was published in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment (ISBN 0195071328).
Some critics have argued that examination of archives following the USSR's collapse in 1991 challenge many of Conquest's statements.
, the famine in Ukraine
and elsewhere in the USSR, which some sources alleged was due to the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin's direction
in 1929-31, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation
, deportation
to labor camp
s and execution.
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."
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
.
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).
He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
.
CMG
CMG may refer to:* Course Made Good,navigation* Case mix group, medical-care accounting mechanism* Collectible miniatures game* Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, a British and Commonwealth honour...
(born 15 July 1917) is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror
The Great Terror
The Great Terror is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of the book is The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties...
, an account of Stalin's
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
purges
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
of the 1930s. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
's Hoover Institution
Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a public policy think tank and library founded in 1919 by then future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, an early alumnus of Stanford....
.
Early career
Robert Conquest was born in MalvernMalvern, Worcestershire
Malvern is a town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England, governed by Malvern Town Council. As of the 2001 census it has a population of 28,749, and includes the historical settlement and commercial centre of Great Malvern on the steep eastern flank of the Malvern Hills, and the former...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...
, the son of an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
businessman and a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
mother. His father served in an ambulance unit with the French Army
French Army
The French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...
in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, being awarded the Croix de Guerre
Croix de guerre
The Croix de guerre is a military decoration of France. It was first created in 1915 and consists of a square-cross medal on two crossed swords, hanging from a ribbon with various degree pins. The decoration was awarded during World War I, again in World War II, and in other conflicts...
in 1916. Conquest was educated at Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
, the University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble or Grenoble University was a university in Grenoble, France until 1970, when it was split into several different institutions:...
, and Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
, 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
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
, Conquest returned to Oxford and joined the Communist Party
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
. Fellow members included Denis Healey
Denis Healey
Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey CH, MBE, PC is a British Labour politician, who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.-Early life:...
and Philip Toynbee
Philip Toynbee
Theodore Philip Toynbee was a British writer and communist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon, a work in several volumes, only some of which are published...
.
When World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
broke out, Conquest joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was an infantry regiment of the British Army.The regiment was formed as a consequence of Childers reforms, a continuation of the Cardwell reforms, by the amalgamation of the 43rd Regiment of Foot and the 52nd Regiment of Foot , forming the 1st...
and became an intelligence officer
Intelligence officer
An intelligence officer is a person employed by an organization to collect, compile and/or analyze information which is of use to that organization...
. 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
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies is a school of University College London . It is the largest centre for the study and research of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and Russia in the United Kingdom...
, where he studied Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
for four months.
In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
as a liaison officer
Liaison officer
A liaison officer or LNO is a person that liaises between two organizations to communicate and coordinate their activities. Generally, they are used to achieve the best utilization of resources or employment of services of one organization by another. In the military, liaison officers may...
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
Sofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...
, Bulgaria. He witnessed the gradual rise of Soviet communism in the country. He left Bulgaria in 1948, helping Tatiana escape the new regime. Back in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana. This marriage later broke down when Tatiana was diagnosed with schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
.
Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department
Information Research Department
The Information Research Department, founded in 1948 by Christopher Mayhew MP, was a department of the British Foreign Office set up to counter Russian propaganda and infiltration, particularly amongst the western labour movement....
(IRD), a unit created for the purpose of combating communist influence and actively promoting anti-communist ideas, by fostering relationships with journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
s, trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
s 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
Greenwood Publishing Group
Greenwood Publishing Group is an educational publisher and is part of ABC-CLIO. It publishes reference works under its Greenwood Press imprint, and scholarly, professional, and general interest books under Praeger Publishers...
, a US company which published a number of books at the request of the CIA. 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"
The Movement (literature)
The Movement was a term coined by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, in 1954 to describe a group of writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, and Robert Conquest...
, which included Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
and Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
. He also published a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
and the first of five anthologies
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
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 PurgeGreat Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, 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
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
" in the period 1956-64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
émigré
Émigré
Émigré is a French term that literally refers to a person who has "migrated out", but often carries a connotation of politico-social self-exile....
s and exile
Exile
Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...
s dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census
Soviet Census
Soviet Census may refer to:*Russian Census , which was incomplete*Soviet Census , which only covered urban population*First All Union Census of the Soviet Union *Soviet Census *Soviet Census *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
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
" of disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
and Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
, 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
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
writers, and had underlain books such as George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
and Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
's Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940...
.
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
Demography
Demography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
evidence
Evidence
Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either presumed to be true, or were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth...
examined by Alec Nove, there were 10-11 million excess deaths in the 1930s,
while according to Norman Davies
Norman Davies
Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA, FRHistS is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.- Academic career :...
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 intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
s for "blindness" with respect to the Soviet Union, and argued that Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
was a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
, rather than an aberration from "true" communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
. Conquest did not accept the assertion made by Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
, and supported by many Western leftists, that Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the "revolution" and were contrary to the principles of Leninism
Leninism
In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
. Conquest argued that Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
was a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson
Neal Ascherson
Charles Neal Ascherson is a Scottish journalist and writer.- Background :He was born in Edinburgh and educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. He was described by the historian Eric Hobsbawm as "perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had...
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
Beatrice Webb
Martha Beatrice Webb, Lady Passfield was an English sociologist, economist, socialist and social reformer. Although her husband became Baron Passfield in 1929, she refused to be known as Lady Passfield...
and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, Walter Duranty
Walter Duranty
Walter Duranty was a Liverpool-born British journalist who served as the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times from 1922 through 1936. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a set of stories written in 1931 on the Soviet Union...
, Sir Bernard Pares
Bernard Pares
Sir Bernard Pares KBE was an English historian and academic known for his work on Russia.-Early Life:Pares was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in Classics taking a third...
, Harold Laski
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950....
, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, Bertold Brecht and Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
of being apologists for Stalinism.
After the Glastnost era of the 1980s released much information from Soviet archives, Conquest argued that the new information supported his arguments. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and revise The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. The new version was published in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment (ISBN 0195071328).
Some critics have argued that examination of archives following the USSR's collapse in 1991 challenge many of Conquest's statements.
Later works
In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the HolodomorHolodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
, the famine in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
and elsewhere in the USSR, which some sources alleged was due to the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin's direction
Collectivisation in the USSR
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...
in 1929-31, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation
Starvation
Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy, nutrient and vitamin intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage and eventually, death...
, deportation
Deportation
Deportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. Today it often refers to the expulsion of foreign nationals whereas the expulsion of nationals is called banishment, exile, or penal transportation...
to labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s and execution.
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
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
, 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."
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
Age of reason
Age of reason may refer to:* 17th-century philosophy, as a successor of the Renaissance and a predecessor to the Age of Enlightenment* Age of Enlightenment in its long form of 1600-1800* The Age of Reason, a book by Thomas Paine...
and its culmination in the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
.
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 ForceUnited States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
colonel. In 1981, Conquest moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
to take up a post at the Hoover Institution
Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a public policy think tank and library founded in 1919 by then future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, an early alumnus of Stanford....
at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
Conquest is now senior research fellow and scholar-curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States
Commonwealth of Independent States
The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional organization whose participating countries are former Soviet Republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union....
Collection at the Hoover Institution. He is also an adjunct fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
Center for Strategic and International Studies
The Center for Strategic and International Studies is a bipartisan Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank. The center was founded in 1962 by Admiral Arleigh Burke and Ambassador David Manker Abshire, originally as part of Georgetown University...
in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, and a former research associate of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
'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
British Interplanetary Society
The British Interplanetary Society founded in 1933 by Philip E. Cleator, is the oldest space advocacy organisation in the world whose aim is exclusively to support and promote astronautics and space exploration.-Structure:...
and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies was founded in 1910 as the sister society to the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic 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
Order of St Michael and St George
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is an order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, while he was acting as Prince Regent for his father, George III....
. His other awards and honors include the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, the Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
Award, and selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
to deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture
Jefferson Lecture
The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is an honorary lecture series established in 1972 by the National Endowment for the Humanities . According to the NEH, the Lecture is "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."-History of...
in the Humanities. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...
.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
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
's Prussian Nights
Prussian Nights
Prussian Nights is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a captain in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army's march across East Prussia, and focuses on the traumatic acts of rape and murder that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that...
. He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1997. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. 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
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
by George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
.
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
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
(the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933).
He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a non-profit educational organization in the United States, established as a result of an Act of Congress in 1993 with the purpose to commemorate "the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust"...
.
Historical works
(Dates shown are not necessarily the dates of first publication)- Common Sense About Russia (1960)
- Power and Politics in the USSR (1960)
- The Nation Killers: The 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 ThirtiesThe Great TerrorThe Great Terror is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of the book is 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 (Fontana Modern MastersFontana Modern MastersThe Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on the writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists whose ideas were shaping the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of...
, 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
- 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)
- His site at Hoover InstitutionHoover InstitutionThe Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a public policy think tank and library founded in 1919 by then future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, an early alumnus of Stanford....
- Great Terror at 40
- Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with historian Robert Conquest about his new book Reflections on a Ravaged Century at PBSPublic Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
- Robert Conquest at Spartacus site
- THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION. Reality and delusion in the course of history
- History on his side
- Robert Conquest's profile at the Stanford University, Ukrainian Studies