{"id":105749,"date":"2015-08-06T13:23:56","date_gmt":"2015-08-06T17:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=105749"},"modified":"2020-04-15T09:57:45","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T13:57:45","slug":"r-i-p-robert-conquest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=105749","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Robert Conquest"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. What a life. What a mind. His books have been enormously important to me, and I’ve read them multiple times. <\/p>\n

His great book The Great Terror<\/i> 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<\/i>. 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<\/i>. (Another common attitude ran along the lines of, “If only someone had told Stalin about what was happening!” Not the brightest bulbs.) <\/p>\n

As Robert Conquest prepared to publish the new edition of The Great Terror<\/i> 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> (I had always heard that that crack came from Conquest. It’s a legendary comment among Conquest-o-philes.) <\/p>\n

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.” <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

It’s strange because I just thought about him recently. I was thinking about re-reading The Great Terror<\/i> and I suddenly wondered, “How the hell old is he by now?” <\/p>\n

He died on Monday. He was 98. If you haven’t read his books (there are many) I highly highly recommend them. <\/p>\n

Here are a couple of them.<\/p>\n

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