Assessing Robert Conquest
Historian Robert Conquest was a fierce critic of Stalinist brutality, but Cold War anticommunism hampered his scholarship.
Robert Conquest died one year ago today. An Oxford-trained historian who worked for the British Information Research Department producing anti-Soviet material and later as one of Margaret Thatcher’s advisers, Conquest is best known for authoring more than a dozen books on Stalin’s Russia.
His books share many features with Cold War accounts of the Soviet Union. Conquest joined other anticommunists in claiming that Stalin’s murderous reign descended directly from Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s politics and thought. But when the historian could set aside his deep bias, he offered important insights into the history of forced collectivization and the rise of Stalinism.
The Young Red
Even among close friends like Kingsley Amis — who wrote that Conquest was always “implacably anti-Soviet” — few were aware that the historian had been a member of the Young Communist League at Oxford or that he had traveled to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1937 at the height of Stalin’s bloody purges.
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