Robert Conquest: Anti-Communist

Dissident: Some of the most famous intellectuals of the West, including the French writer and Nobel Laureate Andre Gide and American conservatism’s Whittaker Chambers, turned to communism in the 1920s and 1930s only to reject it when they discovered that communism was built on deceit and terror. Gide wrote, “I doubt whether in any country in the world…have the mind and the spirit ever been less free, more bent, more terrorized over and indeed vassalized than in the Soviet Union.” But only a few of them then spent the rest of their lives making it their business to expose communism as the most deadly ism of the 20^th century.

No one—not Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not George Orwell, not the six authors of The Black Book of Communism—was a more compelling chronicler of communism than the historian Robert Conquest, an ardent Bolshevik as a young man, who passed away this week at the age of 98. His most famous work is The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, published in 1968 at the time of the Prague Spring and based mainly on unofficial sources. Conquest estimates that under Stalin some 20 million people died from executions, forced labor camps (the Gulag), and famines. Dismissed as gross exaggerations at the time by apologetic leftists, Conquest’s figures were corroborated in time by Soviet historians and opened archives. In a 1991 edition of The Great Terror, Conquest writes that the archives “show[s] things to be rather worse than I originally suggested.”  MORE