Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest
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, United States
Occupation	Historian, poet
Notable works	The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s
Notable awards	See below
Spouse	Joan Watkins ​ ​ (m. 1942; div. 1948)​ Tatiana Mihailova ​ ​ (m. 1948; div. 1962)​ Caroleen MacFarlane ​ ​ (m. 1964; div. 1978)​ Elizabeth Wingate ​ ​ (m. 1979;  2015)​
Children	3

George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG, OBE, FBA, FAAAS, FRSL, FBIS (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British-American historian and poet, notable for his influential works on Soviet history including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968). He was a longtime research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He wrote more than a dozen books on the Soviet Union and he was a traditional conservative.

According to American journalist Jeff Coplon, “The Soviet Union was Conquest's lifetime obsession”. National Review, a political magazine he longtime collaborated with, stated: «Conquest was not merely an “anti-Stalinist,” but an anti-Communist, period: in Russia, in Vietnam, in Europe, in the Caribbean — everywhere». Conquest maintained throughout his career that the core problem with the USSR began with Marxism as a mode of political economy, which he considered fraudulent and discredited. He affirmed: "The mere existence of the U.S.S.R., and its ideas, distorted the way in which many people over the whole world thought about society, the economy, human history". He also called Marxism a “misleading mental addiction”.

In the early 1990s, Richard Nixon said, “[Conquest's] historical courage makes him partially responsible for the death of Communism.” He emerged, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”.

Early career

Conquest was born on 15 July 1917 in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to an American father (Robert Folger Wescott Conquest) and an English mother (Rosamund Alys Acworth Conquest). His father served in an American Ambulance Service unit with the French Army in World War I, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, with Silver Star 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 spending what would now be called a gap year at the University of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, Conquest went up to Oxford, joining as an "open" member, the Communist Party of Great Britain. He did not find it a hotbed of fanaticism; in fact he was able to join the Carlton club while still an open communist. Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee. During this period, to celebrate the coronation of George VI in 1937, he placed nine pisspots, red white and blue, the white ones labelled GR, in an inaccessible but visible position on the roof of Magdalen. It took all morning for the authorities to get them down. Denis Healey remembers: "He always tended to extremes. He had become rather an extremist rightwinger within 10 years."

Robert Conquest had himself been an enthusiast of Stalin, and visited Moscow in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great soviet experiment. Conquest then professed that “girl trouble” took up too much of his time at university to preoccupy him with surplus value; also, he thought zealous adherents to be “bloody fools”. He later recalled: "I found the communists very dull and rather stupid". When the Communist party in Britain denounced the Second World War in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and enlisted in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry , serving with the regiment from 1939 to 1946. In 1942, he married Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. In 1943, he was posted to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies to study Bulgarian, which is today part of University College London. In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission. There, he met Tatiana Mihailova, who later became his second wife. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia where he remained as the press officer. In 1948 he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud, after helping to smuggle two Bulgarians and left Bulgaria with Tatiana. Back in London, he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana. But in 1951, Tatiana Conquest was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and in 1962 the couple divorced.

The IRD years

In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the Labour Attlee government in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications." The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.

Conquest at the IRD was remembered as a brilliant, arrogant figure who had 10 people reporting to him. He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism. During those years, Conquest wrote, for example, a memorandum on the show trials in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, addressing the intriguing question of what it was that made the defendants confess to all the accusations. His articles were circulated within the Foreign Office and commented upon within the East European and Soviet Russian departments of the ministry. In 1947–1949, the IRD started to collect materials on the issue of forced labor in Stalin’s Russia and decided to publish pamphlets and prepare news articles and bulletins on the forced labor camps. It had been decided that one or two names of Soviet camps should be hammered into the mind of the public, until these names were as clearly linked with Communist terror as the names “Auschwitz” and “Treblinka” were linked with Nazism. The Soviet camps chosen for the purpose was Karaganda and Vorkuta. Later, Kolyma in the Soviet Far East was added. The image of the Stalinist terror system geared towards public opinion continued to make its appearance in the works that Conquest later published, notably in The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge in the 1930s and in Kolyma — The Arctic Death Camps.

In 1949 Conquest’s assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached George Orwell for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. Orwell's list, discovered after her death in 2002, included Guardian and Observer journalists, as well as E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin. Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems. One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of Donald Maclean, one of the Philby spy ring, who fled to Russia with Guy Burgess in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, and went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems. At the IRD Conquest wrote various papers which sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was to be elaborated in The Great Terror. Other papers were “Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory”, and on “United Fronts – a Communist Tactic”. Much of IRD works was later published in the Soviet Studies Series. In frank interviews, Conquest would later admit that many topics he wrote on in the 1960s and 1970s had actually been fairly thoroughly prepared earlier, during the IRD period, and he recognized the importance of the factual materials gathered by his associates and himself at the IRD, until his departure, for his later, more academic works on these topics.

In 1950 he served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.

First years as an historian

In 1956, Conquest left the IRD, later becoming a freelance writer and historian. After he left, he says, IRD suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book. During the 1960s, Conquest edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London by the Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series; and in the United States republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by Frederick Praeger, who had published previously a number of books on communism at the request of the CIA, in addition to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Đilas, Howard Fast, and Charles Patrick Fitzgerald.

In 1962–63, Conquest was literary editor of The Spectator, but resigned when he found the job interfered with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union were Common Sense About Russia (1960), The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960) and Power and Policy in the USSR (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961) and Russia After Khrushchev (1965).

The Great Terror

Main article: The Great Terror

In 1968, Conquest published what became his best-known work, 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. 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”. 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 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 of western writers, and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

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."

Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals 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, Owen Lattimore, Romain Rolland, and even American ambassador Joseph Davies, accusing them of being dupes of Stalin and apologists of his regime. Conquest cites various comments of them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.

After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. 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. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Sir Kingsley Amis. The new version was published in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment; ISBN 0-19-507132-8. The American historian J. Arch Getty disagreed, writing in 1994 that the archives did not support Conquest's casualty figures. 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 the IRD. According to Denis Healey The Great Terror was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them".

Although many aspects of his book continue to be disputed by sovietologist historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history, according to anti-communist poet Czesław Miłosz Conquest has been vindicated by history. In 2000, Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff, whose family emigrated from Russia as a result of the Bolshevik 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." While the anti-communist conservative popular historian Paul Johnson, one of Thatcher's closest advisers, described Conquest as "our greatest living historian". And, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash, he was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin.

Anyway, in 1996, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who have been previously attacked by Conquest for his book Age of Extremes, while praising Conquest's The Great Terror "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror", expressed the opinion that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available", thus there was not need any more for "using fragmentary sources" and "guesswork" as "when better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones".

Indeed, at a workshop on Communist regimes, organized by the Swedish Research Council in Sigtuna, Sweden, in June 2000, Conquest mentioned that given all the new empirical evidence that has been made available, he wished that he could completely rewrite The Great Terror, the revised edition of which had come ten years too early in 1990. Conquest answered to professor of Economic History Lennart Samuelson, who was puzzled by his use of literary sources, such as memoirs by defectors and ex-Communists:

“Alas! Such were my preconditions, even after the ‘Thaw’ and Khrushchev’s light de-Stalinization in the 1960s. I now regret that my updated 1990 version with the subtitle A Reassessment was actually published several years too early.”

In the foreword to his “40th Anniversary Edition” of The Great Terror, Conquest points to how he, in the old days, daringly but hesitantly used to quote from Soviet defectors, and that some of them did indeed turn out to be unreliable.

However, in 2002, Conquest replied vehemently to his 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.’”

Furthermore he openly declared himself to have been a Cold Warrior, a title which he rather relished:

“They say [disapprovingly] that we were Cold Warriors. Yes, and a bloody good show, too. A lot of people weren’t Cold Warriors — and so much the worse for them.”

Later historical works

Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978)

In 1978, Conquest published Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, on the infamous Kolyma camps in the Soviet Far East.

Conquest contended that the primary purpose of these camps was not gold extraction, but systematic extermination of the prisoners on a scale rivaling Hitler’s Final Solution. But, in recent years, few Western historians have argued that any series of events, except for the famine in Ukraine in the fall of 1932 and spring of 1933, can be termed genocide as defined by the UN convention. And, in 2003, historian Martin J. Bollinger made an in-depth analysis of Conquest’s calculations revealing them as inaccurate and presenting more realistic estimates of the total prisoners kontingenty and their mortality during the whole Stalinist period.

"In general, the CIA's [early 1950s] and Robert Conquest's [1990] estimates were consistently about twice the numbers subsequently revealed by the Soviet archives, an error Conquest at least has subsequently acknowledged."

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (1986)

Main article: The Harvest of Sorrow

In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide.

The Harvest of Sorrow had a clear moral: that if the older Soviet leaders were direct accomplices in an artificially contrived famine, and the younger leaders today still might justify the procedure, then it followed that they might be willing to kill tens of millions of foreigners or suffer a loss of millions of their own subjects in a war. Conquest said:

"I don't think they want to blow Western populations to pieces. But if they came to America and imposed the collective farm system, then they might well organize a famine."

Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)

For the Trotskyists, Kirov’s murder was the Stalinist equivalent of the Reichstag 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.

In The 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.

He returned to this in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), where he firmly affirmed that Stalin not only sanctioned Kirov's assassination, but used it as a justification for the terror that culminated in 1937 and '38, though no smoking-gun evidence has yet been found to confirm Stalin’s role in the murder.

Poetry and Literature

In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a well-regarded poet 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. During his lifetime, he had seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism published.

Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as "The Movement" which also included Philip Larkin and Sir Kingsley Amis. Movement poets, many of whom bristled at being so labeled, rejected the experiments of earlier practitioners such as Ezra Pound.

He edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influential New Lines anthologies, introducing works by them, as well as Thom Gunn, Dennis Enright, and others, to a wider public. He spent 1959–60 as visiting poet at the University of Buffalo. Several of his poems were published in The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978; compiled by Amis), under the pseudonyms "Stuart Howard-Jones", "Victor Gray" and "Ted Pauker".

It emerged from the pages of poet Philip Larkin’s published letters that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography in the '50s. 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. 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. The true story of the joke became in 2008, Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, a comedy radio play by Chris Harrald.

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.

Science Fiction Novels

Conquest had been a member of the British Interplanetary Society since the 1940s, and shared Amis’s taste for science fiction. Starting from 1961, the two writers jointly edited Spectrum, five anthologies of new sci-fi writing. He also proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel which Conquest had completed. This was revised by Amis, and then it appeared under both their names as The Egyptologists (1965). The novel is about a secret Egyptological London society that is really a husbands' organization serving as an alibi for philanderers. A reviewer in the New York Times felt that their “elaborate little jokes leave an unpleasant taste”. Later, a film version of the novel was canceled when its star, Peter Sellers, was called away to Hollywood.

Conquest published two works of fiction, the one co-authored with Amis, The Egyptologists (1965), and the science fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955).

The Abomination of Moab (1979)

Robert Conquest’s 1979 book of criticism, The Abomination of Moab, sought the total destruction of Ezra Pound as a serious poet due in part to his fascist sympathies. Conquest attached what he described as Pound’s classical pretensions and mistakes, in an attempt to undermine the poet’s carefully cultivated authority. Conquest was the first critic ever to dare question the revered status of Pound's Pisan Cantos.

His view was that (a) Pound’s bigotry is reflected in his poetic work and (b) - and perhaps only contingently - that his poetic work is mostly fifth-rate. For him it was still theoretically possible for a "fascist crank" to be a good poet, but this particular one was not.

Conquest also noticed that lousy poetry was a good if not exact predictor of bad faith in politics.

Conquest considered Pound, against the canting fashions of the day, as a poseur of the highest order, not to mention a lousy poet who garbled his own allusions to classical mythology and did so without any redeeming ingenuity or creativity. Also, in Conquest's opinion, Pound’s notorious fascism and egoism only added to his artistic debit.

“It is politically and morally relevant that we are called upon by admirers of Pound to find the Pisan Cantos a moving expression of the poet’s suffering. In fact, people go so far as to imply that the American army behaved with disgraceful brutality in keeping him in a wired camp without adequate protection from the weather. One may regret all the suffering, or even discomfort; but this took place at a time when the smoke had scarcely ceased to rise from Auschwitz, and millions were still in a far worse case than Pound’s. He had supported the anti-Semitic policies of the Axis (and even now when the facts have long been available to him, I do not think that he has shown much sympathy or pity for the victims of the gas-chambers). In the circumstances one may feel, in one’s heartless way, that having to sleep out in the rain for a bit was a suffering he might have done better to keep quiet about. And in any case, a humanity and sympathy which is mainly expressed for oneself can seldom be particularly moving.”

Having in passing attacked Pound’s claim to have rendered Latin classics into verse, Conquest concluded:

“Pound’s greatest feat, perhaps, was that by sheer persistence he wore down opposition to the extent that many critics hardly dared to do other than take quite seriously a great deal of what was quite clearly boring nonsense”.

Politics

In the 1960s Conquest was a pro-American-nuclear-bases-in-Britain man, regarded as a damnable reactionary by members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Conquest was also a founder and attender of the weekly "fascist lunches" at Italian restaurant Bertorelli's in Covent Garden, arranged by Kingsley Amis. Conquest and the elder Amis campaigned against the expansion of university education, on the grounds that it would dilute standards. "More will mean worse" was their slogan and they never retract that judgment. From this period dates "Conquest's Law", which states that "Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands". (His Second Law is: “Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.”)

On May 4, 1961, The Spectator published a letter penned by Robert Conquest with the title Day of Dupes, in response to a letter of protest against the Bay of Pigs invasion, written by a group of British “intellectuals” and published in The Times. In Conquest's opinion that letter "showed an important amount of anti- American feeling [in United Kingdom]" and was an "amalgam of pathological anti-Americanism, refusal to listen to current facts and refusal to learn from history".

"Moreover, all this anti-Americanism is mere play-acting. Everyone knows perfectly well that America and Britain are linked not merely by interest, but by similarities; that the complex, imperfect, irritating society, capable of change and ever-evolving, is essentially the same in both countries; that a common culture, in this great matter of political liberty [...], is basic to both of us and that without it we cannot breathe."

He also noted: "On the question of American State interests, we [do not] hear any complaints against Fidelist interventions in other Latin American countries".

He wrote that one of the signatories, Mr. Paul Johnson, "has told us how he became interested in politics: on seeing a Right-wing policeman kick a Left-wing girl, he did not conclude, as most of us would have done, that it is a bad thing for a policeman to kick girls, but that it is a bad thing for Right-wingers to kick Left-wingers." Implying that the latter was a good thing.

He also affirmed that anti-castrists, who participated to actions such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, should be supported:

"If the signatories really favour the professed aims of the Castro Government, though they do not always approve the means, then they should support the rebels [who are against Castro government]."

In his opinion, many of the signatories were "duped by a general good will".

"Some of the signatories might even fall for Khrushchev's recent nonsense about how undemocratic it is to stop nations choosing Communism" but "any Socialist who is not just defending a case for debating reasons must admit that he would prefer to live under a Conservative government than a Communist one."

Finally he concluded his letter defending US actions, such as the one attempted in Cuba:

"in principle democracy is indivisible. And this is apart from the right of democracies to defend themselves. Basically, whether the Americans are tactically well advised or not, they are defending the interests of everyone who cares about real, rather than national, progress and liberty. In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth."

In 1967, Conquest, along with Kingsley Amis, John Braine and several others, signed a letter to The Times entitled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Henry Kissinger, when he was first invited by president-elect Richard Nixon to become his National Security adviser, gave Mr. Nixon to read Robert Conquest's book, The Great Terror.

In the 1970s he contributed to a so-called "Black Paper" on British education, lamenting how standards of learning were being eroded. Larkin shared his robust political enthusiasms with Conquest: “Fuck the students … fuck the Common Market … Hurray for Ian Smith, Ian Paisley …”.

Starting on 5 January 1974 Radio Liberty broadcast Solzhenitsyn'S Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union everyday, in addition to heavy coverage of World reactions to publication and to commentaries from Robert Conquest and others. On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany. Shortly after "Daily Express" included comments by Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and Robert Conquest on Solzhenytsin expulsion. Articles included excerpts from the "Gulag Archipelago" and expressed doubts about the future of Détente and the futility of the CSCE.

In August 1974 Conquest made a point that the Soviets were not training a younger generation of political leaders, therefore the top Party position might be won eventually by some unknown figure from the provinces. Conquest concluded that this possibility was a great danger since the new leader would have been quite unskilled in national and international affairs.

Conquest was advisor of Margaret Thatcher and US anti-Communist Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and voted Labour until the arrival of Mrs Thatcher.

In the 1970s Conquest was invited to meet the opposition leader Margaret Thatcher to discuss the Soviet threat. "Margaret Thatcher is the only person in politics, along with Condi Rice, with whom I am on cheek-kissing terms," Conquest said. Asked to help Thatcher with a speech on Russia in 1976, he wrote a draft, and that was, in his words, "the first Iron Lady speech".

In June 1978 Mrs Thatcher drew heavily on an advance manuscript of one of Conquest’s books, Present Danger (1979), for a major speech on foreign policy she made in Brussels. The theme of the book (and the speech) was, in Conquest’s words, “there’s nothing the Russians can do so long as we keep the level of our arms right,” and he dedicated the work to Mrs Thatcher. In the run-up to the 1979 general election, Conquest floated the idea that she might appoint him ambassador to the UN once she became Prime Minister, but she declined to do so.

What worried Conquest particularly, in those years, was the loss of nerve in US foreign politics he believed was a problem during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. “I feel the real urgency,” he wrote to her in August 1979, “to stiffen up Washington”. At the contrary, he really liked Ronald Reagan and became one of his adviser.

At that time, he made warnings that the West and the Soviet Union were on a collision course like two liners in a “fog of ignorance…fallacy [and] factiousness.” In his opinionion, the responsibles for Western fog were the Euro-communists and socialist and social democratic parties who preferred rhetorical denunciations of Western, American, imperialism than critics to the East. Conquest saw European leaders of détente as influenced by them, therefore in danger of colluding with USSR and presiding over the slow Finlandization of the continent. In We and They (1980) and The Present Danger (1979) Conquest sought to warn Reagan and Thatcher to steer a different course. Far from rejecting the label of “Cold Warrior,” he reveled in it, taking pride in being one of the main intellectual sources of the “evil empire” rhetoric of British and American conservatism in the 1980s. He shared the same intransigent views with intellectuals such as Martin Malia, Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, and Leonard Schapiro. He often wrote as if the Cold War and the arms race were interchangeable terms, and argued that "some more moralistically pretentious democratic governments, such as that of Sweden at its worst, were on balance an asset to the Stalinists rather than our side.”

He was denounced in 1990 at the very last plenum of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party by Alexander Chakovsky as “anti-Sovietchik number one”.

He wrote for political magazine National Review on many occasions, and was a speaker at the early conferences of the National Review Institute.

He was also the boldest theorist of the pro-American lobby in British politics. He would like Britain to withdraw from the EU and form part of a much looser association of English-speaking nations, known as the "Anglosphere", as outlined in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999). This was very close to Mrs Thatcher's visceral loathing of Europe.

About his political affiliations, the British writer, and his longtime friend, Christopher Hitchens said that Conquest “might not want to be identified as a full-out conservative, because he is an ex-Marxist and was a committed social democrat — and even voted for Clinton in 1992! — but he has found a sort of home on the civilized Right”. Anyway Conquest replied: “Ex-Marxist? Oh, come on! I was a Marxist when I was 20, and I wasn’t a committed social democrat ever.” As for Clinton, “I don’t vote! I might have said something in Clinton’s favor, knowing nothing about him in those days. I didn’t think the Bush administration was doing very well. I might have hoped that Clinton was a Scoop Jackson type. And, it’s true, I’d like to see at least some Democrats who’d be solid, in the Jackson way.”

Predictions on Soviet Union collapse

In 1966 Robert Conquest wrote an article, "Immobilism and decay", later included in the book Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969), which was a collection of authors edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

He saw Soviet Union as "a country where the political system is radically and dangerously inappropriate to its social and economic dynamics. [...][change] may be sudden and catastrophic."

Six of the fourteen articles in Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics, by Brzezinski, Conquest and others, addressed the Soviet Union's future. They considered "[USSR] collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately."

Conquest made more predictions in 1986 which after proved wrong. For example, he did not think the Soviet Union will be prepared to give up much in the way of arms to get an agreement.

"I would take issue with the idea that less military expenditure in the Soviet Union is going to save the Soviet economy. How do you do it? When you think of it, it's going to take 10 years before it can have any effect. You can't beat rockets into plowshares very easily." Therefore, Conquest was not very hopeful about summit meetings.

He had mixed feelings about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "I think that Brezhnev had a certain amount of politics [...] Gorbachev strikes me as more the (Yuri) Andropov type--the sort of tunnel-vision, give-orders-and-it-will-be-done type." However Gorbachev proved to be very different from Yuri Andropov. Conquest also thought that the Soviet system was more likely to run gradually downhill than to end in a great crisis.

"Some people whom I respect say that the economic problem is going to be a very tough one within a few years; and there are people who talk in terms of paramilitary coups, God knows what. I don't think there will be a coup by the army--a few generals and colonels seize the Kremlin, sort of thing. I wouldn't foresee that for a moment; [...] I rather go with the gradualist theory, this may be something out of a conservatism of mine; [but] other theories are possible."

These last theories of him were disproved by '91 subsequent events (the coup d'état attempt and the sudden Soviet collapse).

Political works

What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Handbook (1984)

In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, with Jon Manchip White, the fictional book What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Handbook which, however, was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion. This book, as many other works of the mid-80s in different media, like Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War", the movie "Red Dawn", and the Milton Bradley game "Fortress America", starts from the premise that a Soviet ground-invasion of USA could be imminent and 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."

Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear field NATO 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" "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."

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."

Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)

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.

However there is much more in this book about Communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest’s greater expertise about the first, and partly because comparatively few Western intellectuals became Nazi. Conquest mainly focuses on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became Communists because they felt or believed that this was “anti-fascism” or “anti-Nazism”.

Later life

In 1964, he married Caroleen MacFarlane, but the marriage failed. In 1978, Conquest then began dating Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a United States Air Force colonel. He and Wingate married the next year.

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’s Hoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow.

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Conquest at his home, 2010

Conquest was a fellow of the Columbia University's Russian Institute, and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a distinguished visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation; a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. In 1990, Conquest was the presenter of Red Empire, a seven-part mini-series documentary on the Soviet Union produced by Yorkshire Television.

Conquest died of pneumonia in Stanford, California, on 3 August 2015 at the age of 98. He had numerous grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter.

Awards and honours

Conquest (left) receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Aretha Franklin (middle) and Alan Greenspan (right) at the White House, 2005

Conquest was a dual national (British and American) by birth. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the British Interplanetary Society, and a Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

His honours include

• Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005);
• Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG; 1996)
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE; 1956)
• Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2009)
• Estonian Cross of Terra Mariana (2008)
• Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005).

His awards include:

• Selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture (the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities)
• Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters (1999)
• Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts & Letters,1997)
• Dan David Prize (2012). Conquest was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
• Antonovych prize (1987)

Works

Historical and political

• Common Sense About Russia (1960)
• Power and Policy in the USSR (1961)
• The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960)
• Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961)
• Russia After Khruschev (1965)
• The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
  • The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990)
  • The Great Terror: 40th Anniversary Edition (2008)
• Where Marx Went Wrong (1970)
• The Nation Killers (1970)
• Lenin (1972)
• Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978)
• Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy (1979)
• We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures (1980)
• Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939 (1985)
• What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide (with Jon Manchip White, 1984)
• 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)
• 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 & Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2

Poetry

• Poems (1956)
• Between Mars and Venus (1962)
• Arias from a Love Opera, and Other Poems (1969)
• Forays (1979)
• New and Collected Poems (1988)
• Demons Don't (1999)
• Penultimata (2009)
• A Garden of Erses [limericks, as Jeff Chaucer] (2010)
• Blokelore and Blokesongs (2012)

Novels

• A World of Difference (1955)
• The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis, 1965)

Criticism

• The Abomination of Moab (1979)

See also

• Mission to Moscow
• Dorothy Parker

External links

• Robert Conquest at IMDb
• Scourge and Poet, a profile of Robert Conquest
• articles by and about Robert Conquest at the New York Review of Books
• "Stanford legend Robert Conquest: new books at 93 for the historian and poet," by Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, August 16, 2010
• Where Ignorance Isn't Bliss, article by Robert Conquest at National Review Online
• His biography at the Hoover Institution
• Great Terror at 40
• Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with historian Robert Conquest about his new book Reflections on a Ravaged Century at PBS
• Robert Conquest profile at Spartacus site
• Robert Conquest's profile at Stanford University, Ukrainian Studies Department webpage
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Conquest on Reflections on a Ravaged Century, 19 December 1999