Everything about Robert Conquest totally explained
Dr.
George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born
July 15 1917),
British historian, became a well known writer and researcher 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.
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'd 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 . In 1956, Conquest left the IRD and became a freelance writer and historian. Some of his books were partly distributed through a US company which published a number of books at the request of the
CIA 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'd 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.
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.
In this book, Conquest was even more scathing about western left-wing intellectuals than he'd 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, isn't 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. This marriage proved lasting. 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 Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters and the
Alexis de Tocqueville Award. 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.
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
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