Robert Conquest 1917–2015
Robert Conquest, the writer on Soviet Russia, was a polemicist and a poet; but above all he was an historian, one of the outstanding scholars of his time, whose books did as much as any other man's to alter our view of the communist experience.
Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet "Socialism". He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as "one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism". Of his many works on the subject, perhaps the most important was The Great Terror, published in 1968 and detailing the full enormity of what Stalin had done to the Russian people in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1970s Conquest was invited to meet the opposition leader Margaret Thatcher to discuss the Soviet threat. According to her authorised biographer Charles Moore, Thatcher was advised that Conquest liked plenty to drink, so she laid in supplies of champagne. The meeting began at 9.30 am and they were still talking at noon.
In June 1978 Thatcher drew heavily on an advance manuscript of one of Conquest's books, Present Danger (1979), for a major speech on foreign policy she made in Brussels. The theme of the book (and the speech) was, in Conquest's words, "there's nothing the Russians can do so long as we keep the level of our arms right," and he dedicated the work to Thatcher.
Conquest subsequently left Britain for well-paid American academe, but he remained in touch and became one of her "Downing Street irregulars", a group of intellectuals, many of them defectors from the Left, who gave her ideas relating to the nature and danger of Soviet communism.
George Robert Acworth Conquest was born a few months before the October Revolution on July 15, 1917, in a hotel at Great Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of Robert Folger Acott Conquest, an American of Virginian stock, and his English-born wife Rosamund.
Young Bob was educated at Winchester, winning an exhibition to Magdalen College, Oxford, although he was rusticated from the latter after a college servant found what the dean called "amorous engines" (or contraceptives) in his room.
At the outbreak of the World War II Conquest was commissioned into the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Transferred to the Intelligence Corps towards the end of the war, from 1944 he served in Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, and later as a press attache with the British military mission to the Allied Control Commission in Sofia.
After demobilisation Conquest joined the Foreign Office, but continued to serve in the same job for the British legation in Sofia. In 1948, however, he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud, after helping to smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country, by then in the grip of hard-line Stalinism.
Conquest continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism. For several of those years he worked for the FO's shadowy Information Research Department, where he wrote various papers which sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was to be elaborated in The Great Terror.
After leaving the Foreign Office, Conquest held a number of academic posts. The first was as Sidney and Beatrice Webb Fellow of the London School of Economics in 1956-8 (he was tickled to have a fellowship named after the authors of what he considered the single most preposterously credulous book on Soviet Russia ever written). Then, after a spell as Visiting Poet at the University of Buffalo, he was literary editor of The Spectator in 1962. He held other American research appointments, in Washington and at the Hoover Institution in California, where he finally settled in 1981.
His first books on Russia were solid, rather than exciting. But it was The Great Terror that really established his reputation as an historian. By the time it was published the Cold War was into its third decade and there were seemingly few illusions about Soviet Russia. All the same, Conquest opened many eyes to the full scale of that horror and everything he wrote was to be vindicated as the Soviet archives were finally opened. In fact, the figures of Stalin's victims which Conquest had given, and for which he had once been derided, have been steadily revised upwards by younger Russian historians to at least 25 million. Most of their deaths were not ordered by the dictator in person, but plenty were. Conquest described how one day in 1937 Stalin and Molotov personally approved 3167 death sentences, and then went to watch a film.
Despite his views on communism, Conquest continued to call himself a man of the moderate Left, voted Labour until the arrival of Thatcher, and emphasised that his warmest American political allies were Democrats.
He was one of the first to grasp the weakness of post-Stalinist Russia, and the ineptitude of its leadership which, he told a Senate committee in Washington in 1970, was "intellectually third-rate and likely to commit blunders". He was also one of the first to foresee the Soviet Union's disintegration.
Conquest always considered himself as much a poet as an historian (he chose Two Muses as the title of an unfinished memoir).He had a particularly felicitous gift for reducing the classics to doggerel. In a riff on Jacques' soliloquy, he wrote "Seven ages: first puking & mewling; Then pissed off to hell with your schooling; Then f---s, & then fights; Then judging chaps' rights; Then sitting in slippers; then drooling." Philip Larkin quoted this to a friend with the words, "He's a genius."
More disconcertingly for their admirers, it emerged from the pages of Larkin's published letters that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography. On one occasion Conquest wrote a letter to Larkin purporting to come from the Vice Squad, which had found the poet's name on a pornographic publisher's list. Larkin panicked and went to see his solicitor, convinced that he was going to lose his job as librarian at Hull University, before Conquest owned up.
Among other interests, Conquest was a lifelong member, later fellow, of the British Interplanetary Society, to which he was recruited by a young civil servant called Arthur C Clarke.
Conquest was appointed OBE in 1955 and CMG in 1996. In 2005 he was presented with the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Robert Conquest was married four times. There were other entanglements, though Larkin was exaggerating when he referred to Conquest's "limitless number of 24-yr-old girls".
From 1979 he enjoyed an exceptionally happy marriage to Elizabeth "Liddie" (nee Neece), who survives him with his children.
Telegraph, London