Robert Conquest, the renowned author of 21 books on Soviet history and politics, passed away on August 3 at the age of 98. In online tributes, Dr. Conquest’s colleagues at the Hoover Institution, where he spent 28 years as a senior research fellow, remembered him as “a tireless investigator of Stalin’s tyranny” (Robert Service), “the most prolific, most influential Sovietologist ever” (Stephen Kotkin) and “a champion of human freedom and a sworn enemy of oppressive and totalitarian regimes and the ideologies that stood behind the tragedies of the 20th century” (Anatol Shmelev).
The news media, too, were full of laudatory words. The Telegraph described Dr. Conquest as “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.” The Times of London said he “did perhaps more than any other historian in the West to bring those unimaginable crimes [of Stalin] to public attention.” In an article published by the BBC, Stephen Evans noted that he “is credited by many as the first to reveal the extent of the horror of Joseph Stalin’s regime.” He cited Dr. Conquest’s “The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties” as an extraordinary work that “changed minds and dispelled doubt when it was published in 1968. …It laid out facts without adornment so they could speak for themselves, spelling out in clear language the detail of the purges and the executions.”
Widely seen as a sequel to the “The Great Terror,” Dr. Conquest’s “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine” (1986) told the story of what we now call the Holodomor. In the book’s eloquent introduction, the author described Ukraine and ethnically Ukrainian and Cossack areas to its east as “one vast Belsen”: “A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their family or neighbors. At the same time, (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.” This, he wrote, “was the climax of the ‘revolution from above,’ as Stalin put it, in which he and his associates crushed two elements seen as irremediably hostile to the regime: the peasantry of the USSR as a whole, and the Ukrainian nation.”
Indeed, Ukrainians around the globe will remember Robert Conquest as the historian whose meticulous and expressive account of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 told the world the truth about Stalin’s premeditated murder of millions of their kinsmen – and gave voice to those millions. “The Harvest of Sorrow” garnered worldwide acclaim; The New York Review of Books cited it among the 200 most notable books of 1986. Its author was interviewed by countless media outlets.
That same year, on October 8, Dr. Conquest testified before the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. He stated: “The Ukrainian countryside had already, in 1931-1932, suffered grain requisitions which left it on the point of famine. In July 1932 Stalin issued the decisive decree: 6.6 million tons of grain were now to be delivered. The figure was far beyond possibility. The Ukrainian Communist leaders protested, but were ordered to obey. As Vasily Grossman puts it, ‘the decree required that the peasants of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children.’ By November 1, 41 percent of the delivery plan had been fulfilled, and there was nothing left in the villages. …‘Brigades’ with crowbars searched the peasants’ houses and yards. A little hidden grain was sometimes found, the peasant then being shot or sent to labor camp…The borders between Ukraine and Russia were blocked by police posts which prevented bread being bought back. About a third of Ukraine itself was officially blockaded so that not merely bread, but no supplies of any sort, could enter. …”
To be sure, there were those who sought to discredit Dr. Conquest and others who tried to tell the story of the Holodomor. The Village Voice for example, on January 12, 1988, published “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right,” an article which alleged that research into the Famine was a campaign of falsification waged by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in concert with influential right-wing politicians in the U.S. And there were others who tried to downplay the crimes of Stalin and company. Ultimately, however, Dr. Conquest was vindicated. One of the expressions of that vindication was the reception for Dr. Conquest’s book “Reflections on a Ravaged Century” (1999). Josef Joffe, writing in The New York Times Book Review, observed that “terror was intrinsic to both totalitarianisms, though many in the West still deny the twinship of Stalinism and Hitlerism… So-called right-wing intellectuals like Conquest …did not have an easy time in the academy during the 1970s and ‘80s when ‘anti-Communist’ became an epithet and moral judgments about the ‘evil empire’ became, well, ‘judgmental.’ Now, a decade after the empire’s demise, and with ever widening access to party and state archives, it turns out that those ‘Cold Warriors’ were right, while many of their opponents look like unregenerate apologists.”
For his invaluable contributions, Dr. Conquest was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005) and the Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005), among many, many other honors.
Robert Conquest is no longer among us, but his scholarship – and his truth telling – endure. We are forever in his debt.