Robert Conquest: Congratulations from Weekly Standard
We note with satisfaction that Robert Conquest's name is among the winners of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award, has lost a certain amount of its luster over time, and this year's class is fairly typical: Recipients now routinely include retiring senior administration officials (Alan Greenspan, Gen. Richard Myers), popular professional athletes (Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Frank Robinson), and aging-but-not-quite dormant figures from show business (Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett, Aretha Franklin). We're not entirely certain where Robert Conquest fits in this company, but his award surely restores the medal's distinction for this season.
Conquest, a British subject long resident in America, is not just a great historian, but a scholar whose original labors on the Soviet Union became part of the history of the 20th century. His seminal work The Great Terror (1968) was in its day the most searching, most fearless, most comprehensive, and most devastating account of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that had ever been published. It still is.
Conquest was not the first to chronicle the horrors of the Soviet regime--and, of course, he was writing at a time when Stalin's heirs still ruled in the Kremlin--but until The Great Terror, neither the scope nor the magnitude of the devastation had been fully appreciated outside the Soviet empire. It goes without saying that The Great Terror, and his subsequent Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, were greeted with derision among most Kremlinologists, and among Western intellectuals generally, for their stern rebuke of Soviet apologists in Europe and America, and Conquest's insight that Stalin was no aberration but a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is not every prophet who is honored in his adopted country, or lives to see his work so richly vindicated. The Medal of Freedom is not just a satisfying badge of achievement, but a measure of the debt we owe pioneers like Robert Conquest.
We should perhaps add a postscript: Despite the solemnity of his scholarly work and the award honoring it, Conquest is by no means a typically ponderous academic but a riotously funny versifier and wit. Asked by his publisher for a new title to a revised edition of The Great Terror, following the Soviet collapse, Conquest replied, "How about I Told You So, You F--Fools?"
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Conquest, a British subject long resident in America, is not just a great historian, but a scholar whose original labors on the Soviet Union became part of the history of the 20th century. His seminal work The Great Terror (1968) was in its day the most searching, most fearless, most comprehensive, and most devastating account of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that had ever been published. It still is.
Conquest was not the first to chronicle the horrors of the Soviet regime--and, of course, he was writing at a time when Stalin's heirs still ruled in the Kremlin--but until The Great Terror, neither the scope nor the magnitude of the devastation had been fully appreciated outside the Soviet empire. It goes without saying that The Great Terror, and his subsequent Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, were greeted with derision among most Kremlinologists, and among Western intellectuals generally, for their stern rebuke of Soviet apologists in Europe and America, and Conquest's insight that Stalin was no aberration but a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is not every prophet who is honored in his adopted country, or lives to see his work so richly vindicated. The Medal of Freedom is not just a satisfying badge of achievement, but a measure of the debt we owe pioneers like Robert Conquest.
We should perhaps add a postscript: Despite the solemnity of his scholarly work and the award honoring it, Conquest is by no means a typically ponderous academic but a riotously funny versifier and wit. Asked by his publisher for a new title to a revised edition of The Great Terror, following the Soviet collapse, Conquest replied, "How about I Told You So, You F--Fools?"