The man behind the book that unmasked Stalinism.

Christoper Hitchens has a great piece on Robert Conquest, the prescient author of "The Great Terror", " the volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."

Here are some excerpts:

A few years ago [Rober Conquest] said to [Christopher Hitchens] that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."

For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain.

"I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "

Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).
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On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."

An agnostic in religion ("did you know that Milton Friedman was an agnostic, too?") Mr. Conquest is likewise suspicious of anything too zealous or systematic in human affairs. He is also refreshingly empirical in his judgments. Asked why he, the great anatomizer and accuser of Stalinism, still regards Nazism as morally worse than the Gulag, he replies mildly but somehow irrefutably: "I simply feel it to be so." In his most recent books, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" and "The Dragons of Expectation," he goes beyond the usual admonitions against Jacobinism and more recent totalitarian utopias, and argues for "the Anglosphere," that historic arc of law, tradition and individual liberty that extends from Scotland to Australia and takes in the two largest multicultural democracies on the planet--the U.S. and India.

Read the whole article in Opinion Journal.

[Conquest] [The Great Terror] [Stalin] [Soviet Union] [Gulag]