Taking on the Apparatchiks
Russians challenge the “deeply cynical caste” that has long ruled them. By Robert Conquest.
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Robert Conquest passed away on August 3, 2015. He was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
His awards and honors include the Jefferson Lectureship, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government for achievement in the humanities (1993), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005), the Dan David Prize (2012), Poland's Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit (2009), Estonia's Cross of Terra Mariana (2008), and the Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005).
He was the author of twenty-one books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs, including the classic The Great Terror—which has been translated into twenty languages—and the acclaimed Harvest of Sorrow (1986). His most recent works are Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999) and The Dragons of Expectation (2005).
Conquest has been literary editor of the London Spectator, brought out eight volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies (1955–63), and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic Prussian Nights (1977). He has also published a science fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955), and is joint author, with Kingsley Amis, of another novel, The Egyptologists (1965). In 1997 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.
He was a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. He has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics, a fellow of the Columbia University Russian Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and a research associate at Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute.
Educated at Winchester College and the University of Grenoble, he was an exhibitioner in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his BA and MA in politics, philosophy, and economics and his DLitt in history.
Conquest served in the British infantry in World War II and thereafter in His Majesty's Diplomatic Service; he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. In 1996 he was named a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
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Russians challenge the “deeply cynical caste” that has long ruled them. By Robert Conquest.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man whose flaws and virtues alike were heroic, was a true Russian. By Robert Conquest.
Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
As his classic work is republished, Robert Conquest reflects on how it threw open the doors of the Gulag’s secrets.
Fifty years ago, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Josef Stalin in a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Robert Conquest on an event "so surprising and unexpected that some members of the audience actually fainted."
The president of the United States reflects on the historian who told the truth about the Soviet Union.
The recently published KGB file of Andrei Sakharov shows the extent to which he was oppressed—and the magnitude of his heroism. By Robert Conquest.
Robert Conquest on the United Nations, the European Union, and the decline of the West.
Remembering Nikita Khrushchev, the crude, poorly educated peasant who laid the groundwork for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. By Robert Conquest.
After the terrorist attacks, the level of American ignorance about the outside world became woefully obvious. Robert Conquest on the need for "more history and better history."
Why the Cold War is still with us. By Hoover fellow Robert Conquest.
The cold war’s effects are very much with us in two major spheres.
There is not a single convincing argument why Britain should join the European Union—not one. But there are plenty of reasons why Britain shouldn't. By Hoover fellow Robert Conquest.
As one of the world’s foremost historians of Soviet communism, Hoover fellow Robert Conquest knows all about the dangers of government centralization. After the publication of his latest book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, he sat down with Karl Zinsmeister to discuss the dangerous impulse toward centralization, which, Conquest reminds us, is still alive and well.
Hoover fellow Robert Conquest explains why Russia’s past, present, and future remain dangerously intertwined. “The collapse of communism has left a heritage of ruin.”
Revolution, in the extreme twentieth-century sense of the seizure of power by a fanatical ideological group, has largely faded.
Earlier this year, CNN broadcast a twenty-four-hour television documentary on the Cold War, supplementing the documentary by publishing a companion book. The series created a furor. Critics charged that the series was inaccurate and—to use a phrase from the Cold War itself—soft on communism. Herewith a debate among three historians. Richard Pipes explains what the television documentary got wrong. Hoover fellow Robert Conquest takes apart the companion book. Then John Lewis Gaddis, who served as an adviser to CNN, explains what CNN got right.
Liberals spent the Cold War refusing to see communism for what it was. Hoover fellow Robert Conquest on “how the mind of the liberal became so much a subject of self-deception.”
Hoover fellow Robert Conquest on men who fought on opposite sides of the Cold War—George Orwell and Alger Hiss—and on the legacy of their era. “Although the Cold War is over in reality, it is still being waged mentally in certain circles.”
Hoover fellow Robert Conquest reviews a new book, The Commissar Vanishes, that documents Soviet doctoring of photographs, paintings, and even sculpture. How the Communists cropped history.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary made quick transitions to democracy and free markets. Yet Russia itself failed to do so. Why? Hoover fellow Robert Conquest explains, drawing on eight centuries of Russian history and his own lifetime of study.
No one foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union, right? Wrong. Excerpts from some two decades of Hoover fellow Robert Conquest's own writing amount to an essay in prescience.
Hoover fellow Robert Conquest examines the uses to which Lenin and Stalin put the technology of their day-and to which future totalitarians might put the technology of tomorrow.
A recent book entitled Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia argues that "Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941." Hoover fellow Robert Conquest examines this argument, engaging in a serene demolition.
Hoover fellow Robert Conquest examines the prospects for peace and prosperity in Russia. His conclusion? "Cross your fingers."
Although a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the brilliant theorist and orator Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and then, in 1929, banished from the Soviet Union. His crime? Opposing Stalin. In 1940, Stalin's secret police murdered Trotsky in Mexico. Reviewing a new biography of Trotsky, Hoover fellow Robert Conquest reflects on a man characterized both by ruthlessness and by "the glamor of the Lost Cause."
In these sixteen essays distinguished scholars and thinkers examine the various manifestations of the minority problem in the USSR.
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