It is a bright Californian spring morning as I arrive at Robert Conquest's apartment for lunch. The eminent Soviet historian and Stalinologist has lived on this grassy edge of the Stanford University campus for two decades. In the placid suburban setting, workmen groom the lawns. A young mother stands by her front door, near an abandoned child's bike.
Inside Conquest fusses about, a courteous host. He has the quaintly antiquated mannerisms of the distinguished English man of letters. It is easy to see here the close friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin: precise in his words, an eclectic interest and love of talking, a subversive wit that breaks through frequently. At 85, he still writes poetry and is only too eager to discuss other poets and show off his own work. He promises his next-but-one book will be his memoirs.
The tranquil Californian morning and the English manners add to the incongruity, a sense of unreality that develops as Conquest warms to his subject. In the sitting room before lunch, talk has turned quickly to the subject that has preoccupied him for so many years. "Why did he want to shoot so many people? You could understand why he would want to shoot his colleagues - they were rivals. But why did he shoot so many?"
It is 35 years since Conquest's ground-breaking book, The Great Terror, revealed the full depth of Joseph Stalin's crimes to the world. If he is still apparently absorbed by the subject, it seems to have two sources: a powerful sense of vindication and an abiding fascination with one of the 20th century's darkest episodes.
Conquest's right-wing political leanings - he still drops in on Margaret Thatcher, an admirer, on annual trips to the UK - have long made his work a target of criticism on the left. Dubbed the "witch-finder general of anti-Sovietism" by the Morning Star, the British communist newspaper, his work still arouses strong passions.
Yet even the opposition from the left that persisted in the years after The Great Terror was published has dissipated in the face of the mass of evidence.
According to Martin Amis, Conquest had a tart answer for his publishers when it came to picking a title for an updated version of his classic work: I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. ("I may have said that," the historian concedes, "but I didn't say that to my publisher.")
Lunch is smoked salmon, brown bread and boiled eggs, eaten around the dining table in the small apartment. Conquest's wife - his fourth, Elizabeth - is away with her grandchildren and the eminent writer affects a degree of elderly helplessness. But the apartment is well organised and clean and he has cleared the table of books - they sit on side tables and on the floor, hand-written notes protruding.
He eats carefully, picking pieces of salmon to drop into his mouth and wiping his fingers on a napkin tucked into the pocket of his bright yellow shirt.
In this genteel retirement, Conquest can allow himself the satisfaction of having outlasted most of the doubters and the Soviet apologists.
"They've given up on what you might call 'Gulag denial'," he says of his critics. But he adds: "They're still working on keeping the numbers as low as possible."
The numbers, in this context, concern the dead. Adding those who died from Stalin's purges and the famines of the 1930s, Conquest came up with a figure of 20m.
Like the elder Amis, Conquest dabbled in left-wing politics in his youth before swinging to the right. It is a surprise when he reveals he was once a member of the Communist party: his writing shows a barely-suppressed contempt for an ideology he considers an intellectually inferior form of Utopianism. With a shrug, he says now he was never politically active and felt only a brief interest in Marxism.
Vindication seems to be only part of what drives him now. To Conquest, the depravities of the Stalin era and the wreckage of the Soviet Union resonate like some terrible comedy. He dwells with relish on new anecdotes that have emerged recently - he keeps a close watch on the new research, much of it being published in Russia and Italy - as if discovering afresh the abominations of Stalin's rule.
"It's a curious thing: Stalin comes out worse than we thought," he says. "You wouldn't think it possible."
The way he sees it, it is hardly surprising that the Soviet empire after Stalin should have disintegrated under a succession of mediocrities. "They had got rid of such a lot of the bright guys. They shot everyone. It was absolutely unbelievable."
But this horror also had its comedy. He chortles over the aberrations of Soviet mismanagement: the way, for instance, that excessive irrigation caused a large part of the Aral Sea - once the world's fourth largest lake - to dry up. "When your seas start drying up, there's something wrong with your planning," he says, the mirth making his face wrinkle.
His scorn is reserved for the incompetent and the stupid. Academics take much of the baiting - a reflection, perhaps, of the lasting resistance in some parts of academia to his work. He lays the blame on Vietnam-era students whose lost faith in America manifested itself, when they grew into positions of power, in an unthinking leftist politics.
At one point, as I flick through a volume of his poetry, Conquest points out a scathing piece ridiculing academics. One line reads: "Where education and psychology meet/A terrible bullshit is born." The parody of Yeats clearly gives him pleasure. "Philip Larkin laughed at that," he says, proudly.
But along with the mirth, Conquest is still struggling to come up with an explanation for the appalling events of the Stalin era.
He brushes off a question about whether Stalin can be described as evil: such metaphysical classification has little value. And he resists easy psychoanalysis, at one stage describing the Soviet leader as paranoid before disparaging his own pop-psychology.
In conversation and in his books, Conquest turns repeatedly to the question of Stalin's character and motivation. His conclusion: a "profound mediocrity" combined with a supercharged will-power created a monster. Having invested his faith in a half-baked ideology, only to see it fail before his eyes, Stalin distorted the reality of the entire Soviet empire to make it seem a success. "They all had to confess they were agents of Hitler," Conquest says of Stalin's supposed enemies. "Why did he have to do that? He wanted to create all this detail. Now you had a different reality. He managed to produce a new reality contrary to what was really going on."
To Churchill's description of Stalin as unnatural, Conquest adds his own: unreal. His will-power proved strong enough to project the illusion around the world, blinding the west to the true situation. It also created a habit of self-denial that came to characterise - and eventually help to undermine - the Soviet Union.
In the end, it is Stalin's almost pointless cruelty, and the stupidity of his apologists in the west, that lingers.
Conquest recounts a recently-attributed comment in which Stalin explained why he had lowered the age for the death penalty to just 12. "He said it was to discourage adults running children's gangs," he says, the incredulity making his eyes widen. At the time, he adds, French communists justified capital punishment for children "because in Russia, they said people mature so much quicker".
As I leave, the great writer is solicitous. Do I have everything I need? Surely there is something more he can do for me?
Three hours have gone by. It is a relief to be out in the sunlight again. The mother has gone, but the child's bike still lies on the bright grass, abandoned, as I head back to my car. Richard Waters writes for the FT from San Francisco.
by Editor on March 7, 2003 at 10:13 PM