“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” — Robert Conquest

“I think once you accept that you have the answer to everything, you can do anything to bring it about because your enemies are trying to stop you, are enemies of reason, of truth of everything – enemies of the future. You represent the people, you represent the nation, you represent everything that is good and that entitles you to destroy the bad people.” — Robert Conquest

It’s the birthday of Robert Conquest, one of the most important and influential historians of the 20th century. He died in 2015 at the age of 98. He started out as a poet. He palled around with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, a rowdy cantankerous trio, all of whom made enemies for various and sundry reasons, some of which had to do with politics. Conquest was a member of the Communist Party and then walked away once he saw what was going on in Russia. He became a ferocious critic, and is – to this day – often branded a “reactionary”, which he definitely was not. He changed his mind about something once more information became available. The “reactionary” thing doesn’t hold weight at ALL once you scratch past the surface ideological panic about Conquest’s “apostasy”. Such comments are meant to discredit him. Conquest said once that “everyone is a reactionary about a subject he understands.” I mean, I get this.

Conquest’s stunning books about the Stalinist purges, the Soviet Terror, the murder of Kirov (which Conquest referred to as “the murder of the century”), the 1933 famine in Ukraine … all came out before perestroika or glasnost, before any accuracy in numbers was possible. He wrote while the Iron Curtain was still impenetrable. He relied on rumors, samizdat literature, as well as his own uncanny sense of how to read the tea-leaves of the bureaucratic double-Newspeak coming out of the Kremlin. You can read the obituary at the New York Times. His books are 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, anyway) of Stalin’s Terror, where the numbers of those killed, disappeared, imprisoned, reaches an almost otherworldly level. The numbers were so hard to imagine (how do you even comprehend 20 million? 30 million?) that Conquest was criticized for being overdramatic, for inflating the numbers, for being a reactionary. (Ironic -but not surprising. Strict and “pure” ideology views anyone who veers from the party-line as an “apostate.”)

When the Soviet Imperium collapsed, and the Kremlin archives opened, Conquest went back to work, poring through all the newly-available material. He worked on a new updated edition of The Great Terror. What he discovered in the records – what existed anyway, surviving Stalin’s compulsive re-writing of history – confirmed the truth of what he already guessed. He hadn’t OVER-estimated the numbers, as his critics accused for decades: he had UNDER-estimated by about 10 million, and maybe more. The numbers are surreal whatever way you look at it: 10 million, 20 million … what does that even look like? I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like a pile of corpses stacked high as the Himalayas.

As Robert Conquest prepared to publish the new edition of The Great Terror in 1990, his pal Kingsley Amis made a joke that the new edition should be called I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.

The Great Terror is not just interesting, it is beautifully written. The prose is chill and clear, but elegant: it flows. It’s a page-turner. One of the most chilling sentences comes after a long paragraph describing Stalin’s cohorts racing around trying to save their asses (see The Death of Stalin if you haven’t already), still believing that the regime they worked for made sense. They viewed Stalin’s Terror as temporary. Once it burned itself out, they could get back to the work of government and bringing their revolutionary ideas to some kind of workable system. Conquest wrote: “They didn’t understand Stalin yet.”

Conquest understood long before it was fashionable, and he did so in the Marxist-drenched late-1960s, when nobody wanted to hear it. There are still those who don’t want to hear it.

The Left hated Robert Conquest because he claimed that Stalin’s Terror did not come about because Stalin was a bad apple who ruined the Utopia “everyone” still believed in, but that the system was set up to create a Stalin. The system encouraged the One Strong Man. This is what Orwell perceived, too, and laid out in 1984, where Winston Smith reads the secret book. A common attitude among the Stalinist Left, which persisted – disgracefully – even after the Show Trials of the late 1930s – ran along the lines of, “If only someone had told Stalin about what was happening!”

Conquest’s work continues to be disputed. It should be disputed. It requires rigorous attention. Now that we know more about the reality of the regime, many have taken on Conquest’s work. Anne Applebaum’s books are hugely important. The Great Terror, though, is unique because it was the first and still, in many cases, the best. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974, and it acted as confirmation of Conquest – ironically. Here was a voice from the inside, here was a man who LIVED it, confirming Conquest’s guesses.

I have often said that you cannot fully understand the history of the 20th century if you haven’t read Conquest’s books.

I told you so, you fucking fools.

 
 
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