About

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.

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    Taking on the Apparatchiks

    Russians challenge the “deeply cynical caste” that has long ruled them. By Robert Conquest.

    April 5, 2012 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Patriot, Poet, and Prophet

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man whose flaws and virtues alike were heroic, was a true Russian. By Robert Conquest.

    January 21, 2009 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Solzhenitsyn Was a Russian Patriot

    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...

    August 8, 2008 by Robert Conquest with Alexander Solzhenitsyn via Wall Street Journal
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    The Great Terror at 40

    As his classic work is republished, Robert Conquest reflects on how it threw open the doors of the Gulag’s secrets.

    April 16, 2008 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    The Speech That Shook the World

    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."

    April 30, 2006 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Robert Conquest: An Enduring Testament

    The president of the United States reflects on the historian who told the truth about the Soviet Union.

    January 30, 2006 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    When Goodness Won

    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.

    October 30, 2005 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Slouching Toward Byzantium

    Robert Conquest on the United Nations, the European Union, and the decline of the West.

    April 30, 2005 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Loudmouth

    Remembering Nikita Khrushchev, the crude, poorly educated peasant who laid the groundwork for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. By Robert Conquest.

    July 30, 2003 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Where Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

    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."

    January 30, 2002 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    The Nasty Mood in Russia

    Why the Cold War is still with us. By Hoover fellow Robert Conquest.

    July 30, 2001 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Out of the Ice Age?

    The cold war’s effects are very much with us in two major spheres.

    March 12, 2001 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Daily Report
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    Why Britain Should Say No

    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.

    October 30, 2000 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Further Reflections on a Ravaged Century

    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.

    April 30, 2000 by Karl Zinsmeister, Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    The Specter Haunting Russia

    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.”

    April 30, 2000 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Global Perils in Perspective

    Revolution, in the extreme twentieth-century sense of the seizure of power by a fanatical ideological group, has largely faded.

    March 6, 2000 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Daily Report
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    The Cold War over CNN’s Cold War

    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.

    October 30, 1999 by Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, John Lewis Gaddis via Hoover Digest
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    How Liberals Funked It

    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.”

    July 30, 1999 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    In Celia’s Office

    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.”

    April 30, 1999 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Inside Stalin's Darkroom

    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.

    April 30, 1998 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    You Are Strong, You Are Weak, Mother Russia

    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.

    January 30, 1998 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    For The Record

    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.

    July 30, 1997 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Totalitarianism and Technology

    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.

    April 30, 1997 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Stalin: The Revised Edition

    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.

    January 30, 1997 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    A Muddle Wrapped in a Mystery

    Hoover fellow Robert Conquest examines the prospects for peace and prosperity in Russia. His conclusion? "Cross your fingers."

    April 30, 1996 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Trotsky, the Fugitive

    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."

    January 30, 1996 by Robert Conquest via Hoover Digest
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    Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future

    In these sixteen essays distinguished scholars and thinkers examine the various manifestations of the minority problem in the USSR.

    January 1, 1986 by Robert Conquest via Books by Hoover Fellows
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