Historian of Russia proved both prophetic and poetic
Robert Conquest’s work revealed extent of Stalinist purges, Ukrainian famine
Though many knew of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, for decades no one had gathered all the facts into a compelling narrative. Robert Conquest changed that. Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s documented the acts perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, died last week at the age of 98.
Conquest, a poet and science fiction buff, turned to the study of the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s out of dissatisfaction with the quality of analysis he saw at the British Foreign Office, where he worked after the Second World War in the Information Research Department, a semi-secret office responsible for combating Soviet propaganda.
As one of the Movement poets of the 1950s, a group that included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn, Conquest embarked on a research fellowship at the London School of Economics and produced Power and Politics in the USSR (1960), a book that established him as a leading Kremlinologist.
Eight years later, during the Prague Spring, he published The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, a chronicle of Stalin’s merciless campaign against political opponents, intellectuals, military officers — anyone who could be branded an “enemy of the people.”
For the first time, facts and incidents scattered in myriad sources were gathered in a gripping narrative. Its impact would not be matched until the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1973.
The scope of Stalin’s purges was laid out: seven million people arrested in the peak years, 1937 and 1938; one million executed; two million dead in the concentration camps. Conquest estimated the death toll for the Stalin era at no less than 20 million.
“His historical intuition was astonishing,” said Norman Naimark, a professor of Eastern European history at Stanford University. “He saw things clearly without having access to archives or internal information from the Soviet government. We had a whole industry of Soviet historians who were exposed to a lot of the same material but did not come up with the same conclusions.”
Reaction to the book split along ideological lines, with leftist historians objecting to Conquest’s thesis that Stalin’s regime was a natural evolution of Leninism rather than an aberration. Conquest summed up his attitude in a short poem:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in, But where he did one in That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in. A later edition, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, included new information made available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was less a reassessment, however, than a triumphant vindication of the original book, since newly released material from the Soviet archives supported Conquest’s findings at every turn. In a moment of gleeful malice, Conquest told friends that his suggested title for the new edition was I Told You So, You Fools (with a vulgar adjective between the last two words).
Conquest returned to the subject of the 1930s in 1986 with his study The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, covering Stalin’s campaign to bring Ukraine to heel and pay for industrial development by expropriating grain from peasant farmers. Millions perished in the ensuing state-organized famine and wave of mass arrests. In his preface, Conquest noted that “in the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter, in this book.”