Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest, born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire on 15 July 1917 and dying on 3 August 2015, was a British-American historian, poet, and novelist. During the Cold War, he ranked among the West’s foremost Sovietologists, shaping the views of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He also worked for the anticommunist Information Research Department, part of the British Foreign Office. For many years a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Conquest is best known for his studies of the Soviet Union, including *The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s* (1968), *The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine* (1986), and *Stalin: Breaker of Nations* (1991). He also wrote two novels and several poetry collections.

His father, an American named Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, served in an American Ambulance Field Service unit with the French Army in World War I and received the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star in 1916. His mother was English, Rosamund Alys Acworth. Conquest attended Winchester College, winning an exhibition to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford. After a gap year at the University of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, he returned to Oxford in 1937, joining both the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Carlton Club. He earned an MA in PPE and a DLitt in history.

When World War II began, Conquest was in Lisbon on an American passport; he returned to England. After the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, he left the party. On 20 April 1940 he was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, serving until 1946. In 1943 he studied Bulgarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The next year he was sent to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to the Allied Control Commission. After the war, he joined the Foreign Office and returned to the British Legation in Sofia as press officer. He later said he first grasped the “horrible realities of a Stalinist takeover” while watching the establishment of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria from 1944 to 1948. In 1948 he left Bulgaria after being recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud for helping smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.

In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, a propaganda counter-offensive unit created by the Labour Attlee government. Its purpose was to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdeeds, distribute it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and financially support anticommunist publications. The IRD also worked to manipulate public opinion. Conquest was remembered there as a “brilliant, arrogant” figure with ten people reporting to him. He remained at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism. In 1949 his assistant Celia Kirwan approached George Orwell for information to identify Soviet sympathisers. Orwell’s list, discovered after her death in 2002, included journalists from the *Guardian* and *Observer*, as well as E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin. Conquest, like Orwell, was attracted to Kirwan, who inspired several of his poems. One Foreign Office colleague was Alan Maclean, brother of Donald Maclean of the Philby spy ring, who fled to Russia with Guy Burgess in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest’s poems. At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote papers that laid groundwork for his later work, including one on Soviet methods of obtaining confessions that he expanded into *The Great Terror*, and others titled “Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory” and “United Fronts – a Communist Tactic.” In 1950 he briefly served as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.

In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office to become a freelance writer and historian. The IRD suggested he combine data from Soviet publications into a book. During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of IRD work, published in London by the Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series; in the United States, the material was republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by Frederick Praeger, who had previously published several books on communism at the CIA’s request, along with works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Đilas, Howard Fast, and Charles Patrick Fitzgerald. From 1962 to 1963 Conquest was literary editor of *The Spectator*, resigning when the job interfered with his historical writing. His early books on the Soviet Union included *Common Sense About Russia* (1960), *The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities* (1960), *Power and Policy in the USSR* (1961), *Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair* (1961), and *Russia After Khrushchev* (1965). His analysis of the Great Purge, before Soviet archives opened, relied on memoirs and accounts of émigrés and defectors, show trial transcripts, Khrushchev’s testimonies, and “imagining” Soviet reality when direct sources were unavailable. Historians such as Hiroaki Kuromiya noted Conquest’s approach.