Robert Conquest, one of the most important and influential historians of the 20th century (who started out as a poet, the guys he palled around with were Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin) has died at the age of 98. His books about the Stalinist purges and the Soviet Terror and the Ukrainian famine came out before perestroika or glasnost, before there was anything even close to accuracy in numbers. He relied on samizdat literature, rumors, the little information we had, as well as his own uncanny sense of how to read between the lines of the bureaucratic double-newsspeak (ie Lies) coming out of Russia. You can read the obituary at the New York Times. What a life. What a mind. His books have been enormously important to me, and I’ve read them multiple times.
His great book The Great Terror was originally published in 1968. There he described the scope (as he could guess at it, anyway) of Stalin’s Terror, and the sheer numbers reached an almost otherworldly level. So otherworldly that Conquest was criticized for being overdramatic, for inflating the numbers, for being a reactionary. (Ironic, since Conquest was a Leftist, in the terminology of the time.) When the Soviet Imperium collapsed, and the archives opened, Conquest went back to work, poring through all the information, in order to come out with a new edition of The Great Terror. He found that his initial guess of numbers killed during Stalin’s regime was probably off (as in under-estimated) by about 10 million, maybe more. The numbers were otherworldly whatever way you look at it: 10 million, 20 million … I mean, what does that even look like? The Left hated him because he claimed, and strongly, that Stalin’s Terror was not because Stalin was a bad apple who ruined the Utopia they still believed in, but that the system was set up from the beginning to create a Stalin. It encouraged the One Strong Man. Just as Orwell laid out in 1984. (Another common attitude ran along the lines of, “If only someone had told Stalin about what was happening!” Not the brightest bulbs.)
As Robert Conquest prepared to publish the new edition of The Great Terror in 1990 with numbers updated and confirmed, his pal Kingsley Amis joked that the new edition should be called I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. (I had always heard that that crack came from Conquest. It’s a legendary comment among Conquest-o-philes.)
The book is not just interesting, it is also beautifully written, and contains a lot of unforgettable passages. One of the most chilling sentences that I remember (it’s been a while since I read it) comes after a long paragraph describing Stalin’s cohorts racing around in a frenzy trying to save their asses and complete their tasks, still believing that the regime they worked for was logical. It may be brutal, but at least it was logical. And Stalin’s Terror would eventually burn itself out, right? And they could get back to the work of government and bringing their revolutionary ideas to some kind of workable fruition. Conquest wrote: “They didn’t understand Stalin yet.”
Conquest’s work continues to be disputed, and the conversation is always an interesting one. I am missing Christopher Hitchens so much right now, because what an obit he would have written. Now that we know more about the reality of the regime, now that there is more “out there” about how it all worked, many have taken on Conquest’s work. That book, though, remains the “one to beat.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974, and it acted as a confirmation for Conquest, a voice from the inside, showing what it was like, how it worked. It lined up with Conquest’s guesses.
Robert Conquest is a real intellectual idol of mine (and a gorgeous writer as well). He also was a master at limericks, and could rattle them off improvisationally.
It’s strange because I just thought about him recently. I was thinking about re-reading The Great Terror and I suddenly wondered, “How the hell old is he by now?”
He died on Monday. He was 98. If you haven’t read his books (there are many) I highly highly recommend them.
Here are a couple of them.
I like his Three Laws of Politics:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2.Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3.The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
I haven’t read any of his poetry. Do you have any recommendations?
There are websites out there with his limericks. Some of them are R-rated, some are just naughty, some are political (he has some good ones about Stalin and Lenin) some are hilarious – he would write them for people he knew, too. Here’s one he wrote for Jessica (Decca) Mitford – famous Communist, living in Oakland, and a good friend:
They don’t find they’re having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It’s no longer fair
To say Oakland’s “not there”
She’s made it a regular Mecca.
and yeah: he is incredible on politics. In my opinion, it’s his history books that are the ones to read. They’re just indispensable! Especially when you know that at first he was just guessing and putting things together with no way to corroborate. And having everyone howl at him for 20 years – until finally it was revealed he had UNDER-stated the Terror.
anyway: a major major mind. Very grateful for him!
There was a quote in the WSJ obituary from his son, where RC told him that if you know enough about any topic, someone will pay you to write about it. I just love the notion that you can go out and make yourself an expert on a topic. It’s just a thing to do.
Yeah, if you read his background – he just got frustrated with all the double-speak and lack of information. So he went out and became an expert – THE expert – in a time when it was nearly impossible to get any verifiable information – AND when it was academic suicide to take these positions. He was up against some serious opposition from those still waiting for the glorious revolution to REALLY occur. Those people are still waiting. I think it’s that bravery too, that ideological bravery, to stand out separate from the pack – that I admire so much. – similar to Orwell. Or Rebecca West. Or all those other non-conforming iconoclasts.
Also, the books sound like they may be dry – but they aren’t at all. They’re gripping and horrible – with easy prose – nothing dogmatic or flowery. Just clear and concise. Very very readable.
I haven’t read Penultima – (a collection of poems) but Hitchens loved it.
I often think about one comment of his about traveling as a young man – is it from Reflections? He said he found Russia to be the opposite of England in that at home things were generally legal unless they were specifically outlawed but in Russia you had to assume everything was illegal unless you were given specific guarantees that it was ok to do. And that he got the sense that this was a Tsarist legacy, it was just a given about how the society was run since time immemorial. Even Nazi Germany felt comparatively free for a foreign traveler – you could, e.g., sleep in the park and the police wouldn’t hassle you.
I think about this observation all the time .
Wow. So insightful – he was so good at that type of granular and yet somehow emotional (i.e. you have to “pick up on it”) observation.
There’s a lot of dovetails in the Hannah Arendt book I’m reading right now. I’m in the section on Totalitarianism, and she’s doing a compare/contrast to Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia – and the problem with Russia, as Conquest knew personally, was that there just wasn’t the documentation available like there was with Nazi Germany – who documented everything. Even after the archives were opened – there are all these gaps. You still have to read between the lines to take a stab at what happened.
This was Stalin, obviously – who was secretive and made sure his fingerprints weren’t anywhere on anything – but also, the secret police were so powerful that much of what happened was off the books. And, of course, the secret police were hugely active during the time of Czars too – if I recall, when Lenin re-instituted the secret police, it was hugely controversial among his fellow revolutionaries who thought it was a betrayal of their new open Utopia they thought they were creating. I mean, that happened EARLY – a huge red flag of what the regime was going to be like.
Conquest’s observation reminds me of the sign above the ant hole in The Once and Future King when Merlin has turned Wart into an ant, “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory.”
I think of the briliant Russian novelists and mathematicians and physicists: often so idiosyncratic. And then I look at Russian history and their consistent choices of Strong Men (or Catherine The Great) – Tsars to Communists dictators to Putin and I wonder at the pressures and preferences in a culture that creates either followers or rebels or despots.
Yeah – I just read Andrew Meier’s Black Earth, earlier this year, about Russia under Putin, and there are some disturbing corollaries. Maybe because the land mass is so huge – the overall sense is that you need a strong man/despot to hold it together.
Edvard Radzinsky – a Russian playwright who has written three excellent books (one about Nicholas and Alexandra, one about Rasputin, and one about Stalin) is REALLY interesting on the Russian tendency (in politics anyway) to become fanatical, to love power, to resist rationalism. And he says all that, as a Russian – so it carries some weight.