Robert Conquest | |
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.jpg) Conquest in 1987 | |
| Born | George Robert Acworth Conquest (1917-07-15)15 July 1917 Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England |
| Died | 3 August 2015(2015-08-03) (aged 98) Stanford, California, U.S. |
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| Notable awards | See below |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
George Robert Acworth ConquestCMG OBE FBA FRSL (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet and novelist.[1] He was one of the West’s leadingSovietologists during theCold War and was influential to bothRonald Reagan andMargaret Thatcher.
A long-time research fellow atStanford University'sHoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on theSoviet Union. His books includedThe Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968);The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (1986); andStalin: Breaker of Nations (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.
Conquest was born inGreat Malvern, Worcestershire,[1] to an American father, Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, and an English mother, Rosamund Alys Acworth.[2][3] His father served in anAmerican Ambulance Field Service unit with theFrench Army in World War I, and was awarded theCroix de Guerre, with Silver Star in 1916.[4]
Conquest was educated atWinchester College, where he won anexhibition to studyPhilosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) atMagdalen College, Oxford. He took a gap year, spending time at theUniversity of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, and returning to Oxford in 1937, where he joined theCommunist Party of Great Britain and theCarlton Club.[5] He was awarded anMA in PPE and aDLitt in history.[6]
In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of theSecond World War, Conquest returned to England.[7] As the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and was commissioned into theOxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on 20 April 1940, serving with the regiment until 1946.[8][5]
In 1943 he was posted to theSchool of Slavonic and East European Studies (later part ofUniversity College London) to study Bulgarian.[9] The following year he was posted toBulgaria as aliaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to theAllied Control Commission. At the end of the war, he joined theForeign Office, returning to the British Legation inSofia where he remained as the press officer.[1] In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.[9]
In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office'sInformation Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by theLabourAttlee government[10] in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications."[11] The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.[12] Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him.[5] He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.[9]
In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approachedGeorge Orwell for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers.Orwell's list, discovered after her death in 2002, includedGuardian andObserver journalists, as well asE. H. Carr andCharlie Chaplin.[13] Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems.[9] One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother ofDonald Maclean, one of thePhilby spy ring, who fled to Russia withGuy Burgess in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems.[5] At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on inThe Great Terror. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts – a Communist Tactic".[9] In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.[citation needed]
In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian.[9] After he left, he says, the Information Research Department (IRD) suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book.[10] During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London bythe Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series.[10] Many of his Foreign Office works were published this way.[9] In the United States, the material was republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series byFrederick Praeger, who had previously published several books on communism at the request of the CIA,[10] in addition to works byAleksandr Solzhenitsyn,Milovan Đilas,Howard Fast, andCharles Patrick Fitzgerald.[14]
In 1962–1963 Conquest was literary editor ofThe Spectator, but he resigned when he found the job interfering with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union wereCommon Sense About Russia (1960),The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960) andPower and Policy in the USSR (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union includedCourage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961) andRussia After Khrushchev (1965).[9]
In 1968 Conquest published what became his best-known work,The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of theGreat Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938. Many reviewers at the time were not impressed by his way of writing about the Great Terror, which was in the tradition of "great men who make history".[12] 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 Ukrainianémigrés andexiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as theSoviet census.[15]
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 disgracedCommunist Party of the Soviet Union leaders such asNikolai Bukharin andGrigory Zinoviev, who were executed shortly thereafter. 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 ofwestern writers, and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such asGeorge Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four andArthur Koestler'sDarkness at Noon.[16]
Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges. By his estimates, Stalinist purges had led to the deaths of some 20 million people. He later stated that the total number of deaths could "hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million."[17]
Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals such asBeatrice andSidney Webb,George Bernard Shaw,Jean-Paul Sartre,Walter Duranty,Sir Bernard Pares,Harold Laski,D. N. Pritt,Theodore Dreiser,Bertolt Brecht,Owen Lattimore, andRomain Rolland, as well as American ambassadorJoseph Davies, accusing them of being dupes of Stalin and apologists of his regime. Conquest cites various comments made by them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.[18]
After the opening up of theSoviet archives, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and reviseThe Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titledI Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, SirKingsley Amis. The new version was published in 1990 asThe Great Terror: A Reassessment;ISBN 0-19-507132-8.[19] The American historianJ. Arch Getty disagreed, writing in 1993 that the archives did not support Conquest's casualty figures.[20] In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Robert Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by theIRD.[21]According toDenis HealeyThe Great Terror was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them".[5]
Many aspects of his book continueto be disputed bysovietologist historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history, such asStephen G. Wheatcroft, who insists that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are too high, even in his reassessments.[22][23] In 2000,Michael Ignatieff, whose family had emigrated from Russia as a result of theBolshevik Revolution, wrote "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure."[24] Conservative historianPaul Johnson, one ofThatcher's closest advisers, described Conquest as "our greatest living historian". And, in the phrase ofTimothy Garton Ash, he wasSolzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn.[5]
In 1996 Marxist historianEric Hobsbawm, who had been previously attacked by Conquest for his bookAge of Extremes,[25] praised Conquest'sThe Great Terror "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror". However he expressed the view that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available". As a result, he wrote, there was no need for "fragmentary sources" and "guesswork". "[W]hen better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones."[26] In 2002 Conquest replied to hisrevisionist critics:"They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire."[27]
In 1986 Conquest publishedThe Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture inUkraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due tostarvation,deportation tolabor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide.[9] According to historiansStephen Wheatcroft andR. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Nevertheless, he wrote to them in a letter in 2003 that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."[28][29]
For theTrotskyists, Kirov's murder was the Stalinist equivalent of theReichstag fire, deliberately started by the Nazis to justify the arrest of German Communists. The Trotskyist-Menshevik view became the dominant one among western historians, popularised in Robert Conquest's influential books.[30]
InThe Great Terror, Conquest already undermined the official Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss,Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.[citation needed]
He returned to this inStalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), where he argued that Stalin not only sanctioned Kirov's assassination, but used it as a justification for the terror that culminated in 1937–38, though no evidence has been found to confirm Stalin's role in the murder.[13][31][32]
In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a well-regarded poet[33] whose poems have been published in various periodicals from 1937. In 1945 he was awarded the PEN Brazil Prize for his war poem "For the Death of a Poet" – about an army friend, the poet Drummond Allison, killed in Italy – and, in 1951, he received a Festival of Britain verse prize.[34] During his lifetime, he had seven volumes of poetry[35] and one of literary criticism[36] published.
Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as"The Movement" which also includedPhilip Larkin andKingsley Amis. Movement poets, many of whom bristled at being so labeled, rejected the experiments of earlier practitioners such asEzra Pound.[16]
He edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influentialNew Lines anthologies, introducing works by them, as well asThom Gunn,Dennis Enright, and others, to a wider public.[37] He spent 1959–60 as visiting poet at theUniversity of Buffalo. Several of his poems were published inThe New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978; compiled by Amis), under the pseudonyms "Stuart Howard-Jones", "Victor Gray" and "Ted Pauker".[citation needed]
It emerged from the pages of poetPhilip Larkin'spublished letters that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography in the 1950s.[9] When Larkin was in Hull, Conquest sent him judicious selections of the latest pornography, and, when he came down to London, Conquest took him on shopping trips to the Soho porn shops.[13] On one occasion Conquest, in 1957, wrote a letter to Larkin purporting to come from the Vice Squad which had found the poet's name on a pornographic publisher's list. Larkin panicked and went to see his solicitor, convinced that he was going to lose his job as librarian at Hull University, before Conquest owned up.[9] The true story of the joke became in 2008,Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, a comedy radio play by Chris Harrald.[38]
Soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn met with Conquest, asking him to translate a 'little' poem of his into English verse. This was "Prussian Nights" – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre – published in 1977.[39]
A newCollected Poems, edited by Elizabeth Conquest, was published in March 2020 by the Waywiser Press.[40]
Conquest had been a member of theBritish Interplanetary Society since the 1940s, and shared Amis's taste for science fiction. Starting from 1961, the two writers jointly editedSpectrum, five anthologies of new sci-fi writing.[13] Conquest also proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel that Conquest had completed. This was revised by Amis, then it appeared under both their names asThe Egyptologists (1965).[13] The novel is about a secret Egyptological London society that is really a husbands' organization serving as an alibi for philanderers.[16][41] A reviewer inThe New York Times felt that their "elaborate little jokes leave an unpleasant taste".[13]
Later a film version of the novel was cancelled when its star,Peter Sellers, was called away to Hollywood.[42] Conquest published a science-fiction novel,A World of Difference (1955).[1]
In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, withJon Manchip White, the fictional bookWhat to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide which, however, was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion. This book, as many other works of the mid-1980s in different media, like SirJohn Hackett'sThe Third World War, the movieRed Dawn, and theMilton Bradley gameFortress America, starts from the premise that a Soviet ground-invasion of the United States could be imminent and that the Soviet Union was about to engulf the world.
It is widely accepted that the United States now faces a real possibility of succumbing to the power of an alien regime unless the right policies are pursued. [This book's aim] is, first, to show the American citizen clearly and factually what the results of this possible Soviet domination could be and how it would affect him or her personally; and second, to give some serious advice on how to survive."[43]
Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear fieldNATO was only possibly matching USSR military power:
We live in dangerous times. Such miscalculations are very possible. But they are not inevitable. The American people and their representatives have it in their power to prevent their country from undergoing the ordeal we have described. A democratic government, with all its distractions and disadvantages, ... It is not infallible, it is slow to learn, and it is willing to grasp at comfortable illusions; but it may yet act decisively"[44]"But why should we fear that such an ordeal may face us? The economic potential of the West in gross national product is far greater than that of the Soviet Union....In fact, the Soviet Union is economically far behind the United States. American technology is always a generation ahead of theirs. They have to turn to the United States for wheat. The Soviet economy is at a dead end. The Communist system has failed to win support in any of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet idea has no attractions. On any calculation—of economic power or social advance or intellectual progress there could be no question of the Russians imposing their will. But in terms of actual military power, the West's advantage does not seem to have been made use of. It is at least matched, and many would say overmatched, in the nuclear field; the Western forces in Europe have less than half the striking power of their opponents. It is no good our being more advanced than they are if this is not translated into power—both military power and political willpower."[45]
In 1986 Conquest affirmed that "a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us."[41]
| External videos | |
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 Booknotes interview with Conquest onReflections on a Ravaged Century, 19 December 1999,C-SPAN | |
| Presentation by Conquest ofReflections on a Ravaged Century, 19 January 2000,C-SPAN |
Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a book devoted to the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.[46]
There is much more in this book about communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest's greater expertise on communism, and partly because comparatively few Western intellectuals became Nazis. He focuses mainly on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became communists because they felt or believed that this was "anti-fascism" or "anti-Nazism".[46]
Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations:[47]
Conquest's first and second law are attested by at least two sources.[47] On 14 February 2003,Andrew Brown wrote of Conquest's campaign against the expansion of university education that "[f]rom this period dates 'Conquest's Law', which states that 'Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands'. This was later supplemented with the balancing rule that every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents."[5] In his 1991Memoirs,Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.' (The Second Law, more recent, says, 'Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.')"[48]
On 25 June 2003,John Derbyshire wrote in theNational Review Online's blogThe Corner that "[a]s best I can remember", Conquest conjectured three laws of politics:[49]
Derbyshire commented: "Of the Second Law, Conquest gave theChurch of England andAmnesty International as examples. Of the third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actuallyIS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – e.g. the postwarBritish secret service." For these statements, Conquest would become well known among certain thinkers, especially onlineconservatives; however, Derbyshire cited no source for them and implied his memory was not certain on the matter. Indeed, the second law given here isO'Sullivan's first law, which was stated byJohn O'Sullivan in his article "O'Sullivan's First Law" in the 27 October 1989 print issue of theNational Review, in which he also references Derbyshire's Conquest's third law as Conquest's second law:
That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence theACLU, theFord Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels'sIron Law of Oligarchy takes over—and the rest follows.
Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):
The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Examples: virtually any conservative party anywhere, theRonald Lauder for Mayor campaign, and the British secret service. That last example is, however, flawed, since the British secret service actually was controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies in the form of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al. In which case, Conquest's Law should have operated to make M1-6 [sic] a crack anti-Soviet intelligence service of James Bond proportions. But these are deep waters.[50]
Conquest was married four times, first in 1942 to Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1948.[9] There followed a marriage to Tatiana Mihailova (1948–1962),[9] whom he had helped escape from Bulgaria.[1] She was diagnosed withschizophrenia in 1951. In 1962 he married Caroleen Macfarlane (through whom he was the uncle by marriage ofCharles Banner); they divorced in 1978.[9] That year he began dating Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of aUnited States Air Force colonel. He and Wingate married in 1979. When he died in 2015, he had several grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter.[1][5]
In 1981 Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University'sHoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow.[9] In 1985 he signed a petition in support of the anti-CommunistContras (Nicaragua).[51] He was a fellow of theColumbia University's Russian Institute, and of theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a distinguished visiting scholar atThe Heritage Foundation; a research associate ofHarvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute.[1] In 1990 he presentedRed Empire, a seven-part mini-series on the Soviet Union produced byYorkshire Television.[52]
Conquest died in 2015 inStanford, California, at the age of 98, of respiratory failure as a result ofParkinson's disease.[1][16]
Conquest was a Fellow of theBritish Academy, theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, theRoyal Society of Literature, and theBritish Interplanetary Society, and a Member of theSociety for the Promotion of Roman Studies.[9]
His honours include
His awards include:
Historical and political
Journal articles
Poetry
Novels
Criticism
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1994Shevchenko National Prize winners | |
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