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			{{Short description\|British-American historian and poet (1917–2015)}}
	Dr. '''George Robert Ackworth Conquest''' (born ] ]), ] ], became one of the best-known writers on the ] with the publication, in 1968, of his account of ] ] of the 1930s, '']''.
			{{Use dmy dates\|date=August 2015}}
			{{Use British English\|date=July 2012}}
			{{Infobox writer
			\| name = Robert Conquest
			\| image = Robert Conquest (cropped).jpg
			\| caption = Conquest in 1987
			\| honorific_suffix = {{post-nominals\|country=GBR\|size=100%\|CMG\|OBE\|FBA\|FRSL}}
			\| birth_name = George Robert Acworth Conquest
			\| birth_date = {{birth date\|1917\|07\|15\|df=y\|}}
			\| birth_place = ], Worcestershire, England
			\| death_date = {{death date and age\|2015\|08\|03\|1917\|07\|15\|df=y\|}}
			\| death_place = ], U.S.
			\| citizenship = {{ubl\|United Kingdom\|United States}}
			\| occupation = {{cslist\|Historian\|poet}}
			\| education = {{ubl\|]\|]\|]}}
			\| notableworks = {{ubl\|'']'' (1968)\|'']'' (1986)}}
			\| awards = ]
			\| spouse = {{plainlist\|
			*{{marriage\|Joan Watkins\|1942\|1948\|end=div}}
			*{{marriage\|Tatiana Mihailova\|1948\|1962\|end=div}}
			*{{marriage\|Caroleen MacFarlane\|1964\|1978\|end=div}}
			*{{marriage\|Elizabeth Wingate\|1979}}}}
			\| children = 3
			}}
			{{Conservatism UK\|Intellectuals}}
			{{Conservatism US\|intellectuals}}
			'''George Robert Acworth Conquest''' {{post-nominals\|country=GBR\|CMG\|OBE\|FBA\|FRSL}} (15 July 1917{{snd}}3 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet, and novelist.<ref name=NYTobit/> He was briefly a member of the ]<ref>{{Cite web \|title=Stanford historian Robert Conquest, expert on Soviet Union, dies at 98 \|url=https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2015/08/robert-conquest-obit-080615 \|website=Stanford University}}</ref> but later wrote several books against Communism.

			A long-time research fellow at ]'s ], Conquest was most notable for his work on the ]. His books included '']'' (1968); '']'' (1986); and '']'' (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.

			==Early life and education==
			Conquest was born in ], Worcestershire,<ref name="NYTobit"/> to an American father, Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, and an English mother, Rosamund Alys Acworth.<ref>Encyclopedia of British Writers, 19th and 20th Centuries by Christine L. Krueger page 87</ref><ref>Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Volume 2 By R. Reginald, Douglas Menville, Mary A. Burgess</ref> His father served in an ] unit with the ], and was awarded the ] in 1916.<ref>Supplement to the ''Alumni Register'' (October 1920), "Pennsylvania; A Record of the University's Men in the Great War", University of Pennsylvania General Alumni Society, 1920, page 40.</ref>

			Conquest was educated at ], where he won an ] to study ] (PPE) at ]. He took a gap year, spending time at the ] and in Bulgaria, and returning to Oxford in 1937, where he joined the ] and the ].<ref name=Brown/> He was awarded an ] in PPE and a ] in history.<ref>{{cite web \|title=Robert Conquest \|url=https://www.hoover.org/profiles/robert-conquest \|website=Hoover Institution \|accessdate=11 February 2019}}</ref>

	==Career==		==Career==
			===War years===
	Conquest was born ], ], the son of an ] businessman and an English mother. His father served in an ambulance unit with the French Army in ], winning a ] in 1916. Robert was educated at ], the ], and ], where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor's and master's degrees in ], and his doctorate in Soviet history. Conquest is sometimes disparagingly referred to as a "mere journalist", so it is important to note that he is a professionally qualified historian, despite not having had a conventional academic career. (Indeed, in 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the ].)
			In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of the ], Conquest returned to England.<ref name=Quadrant>{{cite web\|title=Vale Robert Conquest, Historian and Poet\|url=http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/08/vale-robert-conquest/\|website=Quadrant\|date=4 August 2015 \|publisher=quadrant.org.au\|accessdate=15 October 2015}}</ref> As the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and was commissioned into the ] on 20 April 1940, serving with the regiment until 1946.<ref>{{London Gazette \|issue=34837 \|date=23 April 1940 \|page=2459 \|supp=y}}</ref><ref name="Brown"/>

			In 1943 he was posted to the ] (later part of ]) to study Bulgarian.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> The following year he was posted to ] as a ] to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to the ]. At the end of the war, he joined the ], returning to the British Legation in ] where he remained as the press officer.<ref name=NYTobit/> In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.<ref name=Telegraphobit/>
	In 1937, after his year studying at the University of Grenoble and travelling in ], Conquest returned to Oxford and joined the ]. Fellow members included ] and ]. These were the years of the ] against ], when many western intellectuals were attracted to ]. It was also the period of Stalin's purges, although few in the west were aware of this at the time. Conquest later made light of his commitment to Communism, but the journalist ], who knows Conquest well, says that he was a more serious Communist than he now admits.

			===Information Research Department===
	When ] broke out, Conquest joined the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (enlisting was a sign that he was out of sympathy with the Communist Party's anti-war line), and became, like many intellectuals, an intelligence officer. That a known Communist should have been allowed to join the intelligence service seems extraordinary in retrospect, but the Army seems to have taken the view that the political skills of people like Conquest outweighed any possible security risk. Unlike similar figures like ] and ], Conquest has never been accused of having used his position to spy for the Soviet Union. In 1940, he married Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. In 1942, he was posted to the School of Slavonic Studies, where he studied Bulgarian for four months.
			In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's ] (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the ] ] government<ref name="Leigh"/> in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications."<ref>Timothy Garton Ash. "Orwell's List" (review), ''New York Review of Books'', 23 September 2003.</ref> The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.<ref name="Baltic Worlds 2">{{cite web\|last1=Samuelson\|first1=Lennart\|title=A pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet studies during the Cold War\|url=http://balticworlds.com/a-pathbreaker-robert-conquest-and-soviet-studies-during-the-cold-war/\|website=Baltic Worlds\|accessdate=22 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him.<ref name="Brown"/> He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

			In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached ] for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. ], discovered after her death in 2002, included '']'' and '']'' journalists, as well as ] and ].<ref name="Homberger">{{cite news \|last=Homberger \|first=Eric \|date=5 August 2015 \|title=Robert Conquest obituary \|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest \|newspaper=The Guardian \|accessdate=11 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of ], one of the ] spy ring, who fled to Russia with ] in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems.<ref name="Brown"/> At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on in ''The Great Terror''. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts – a Communist Tactic".<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.{{citation needed\|date=October 2020}}
	In 1944, Conquest was posted to ] as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command. There, he met Tatiana Mihailova, who later became his second wife. At the end of the war, he was transferred to the diplomatic service and became the press officer at the British embassy in ]. He witnessed the gradual rise of Soviet Communism in the country, becoming completely disillusioned with Communist ideas in the process. He left Bulgaria in 1948, helping Tatiana escape the new regime. Back in ], he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana. This marriage later broke down when Tatiana was diagnosed with ].

			===Writing===
	Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's ] (IRD), a unit created for the purpose of combating Communist influence and actively promoting anti-Communist ideas, by fostering relationships with journalists, trade unions and other organisations. Conquest's time with the IRD has sparked some controversy, becoming a favourite topic of many critics (particularly on the political Left) who claim that his later historical work was intentional anti-Communist propaganda. Generally, these assertions are viewed with skepticism by other historians who have studied Conquest's work. Conquest is unapologetic about his work with the IRD, arguing that the organization was only responding to the pro-Communist actions of the Soviet Union.
			In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> After he left, he says, the Information Research Department (IRD) suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book.<ref name="Leigh">{{cite news \|last=Leigh \|first=David \|author-link=David Leigh (journalist) \|date=27 January 1978 \|title=Death of the department that never was \|url=http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/e/fo_deceit_unit_graun_27jan1978.html \|newspaper=The Guardian \|accessdate=11 September 2015}}</ref> During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London by ] as the Soviet Studies Series.<ref name="Leigh"/> Many of his Foreign Office works were published this way.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In the United States, the material was republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by ], who had previously published several books on communism at the request of the CIA,<ref name="Leigh"/> in addition to works by ], ], ], and ].<ref>{{cite news \|last=Lyons \|first=Richard D. \|date=5 June 1994 \|title=Frederick A. Praeger Dies at 78; Published Books on Communism \|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/05/obituaries/frederick-a-praeger-dies-at-78-published-books-on-communism.html \|newspaper=The New York Times \|access-date=27 July 2018}}</ref>

	In ~~1956,~~ Conquest ~~left the IRD and became a freelance writer and historian. In 1962-63, he~~ was literary editor of '']'', but resigned when he found it ~~interfered~~ with his historical writing. His first books, ~~''Power~~ ~~and~~ ~~Politics~~ in ~~the~~ ~~USSR~~'' ~~and~~ ''Soviet Deportation of Nationalities''~~, came out in~~ 1960. In ~~addition~~ to ~~his scholarly work, Conquest was a major figure in a prominent literary movement~~ in the ~~UK known as ], which included ] and ]. He also published a science fiction novel and the first of five anthologies of science fiction he co-edited with ]~~. His other early works on the Soviet Union included ''~~Soviet~~ ~~Nationalities~~ ~~Policy~~ in ~~Practice'',~~ ''~~Industrial~~ ~~Workers in the USSR'', ''Justice~~ and ~~the Legal System in the USSR~~'' ~~and~~ ''~~Agricultural~~ ~~Workers~~ ~~in the USSR''.~~		In 1962–1963 Conquest was literary editor of '']'', but he resigned when he found the job interfering with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union were ''Common Sense About Russia'' (1960), ''The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities'' (1960) and ''Power and Policy in the USSR'' (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included ''Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair'' (1961) and ''Russia After Khrushchev'' (1965).<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

			==Historical works==
	==The Great Terror==
	:''~~Main article: ]~~''		===''The Great Terror'' (1968)===
			{{Main\|The Great Terror (book)}}
			In 1968 Conquest published what became his best-known work, ''The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties'', the first comprehensive research of the ], which took place in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938. Many reviewers at the time were not impressed by his way of writing about the Great Terror, which was in the tradition of "great men who make history".<ref name="Baltic Worlds 2" /> The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "]" in the period 1956–64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian ]s and ]s dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the ].<ref name=GT1>{{cite book\|last1=Conquest\|first1=Robert\|title=The Great Terror\|date=1968\|edition=1st}}</ref>

			The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "]" of disgraced ] leaders such as ] and ], who were executed shortly thereafter. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of ] writers, and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as ]'s '']'' and ]'s '']''.<ref name="WSJ 4"/>
	In 1968, Conquest published what became his best-known and most hotly contested work, ''The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties'', the first comprehensive research of the ], which took place in the Soviet Union between 1937 and 1938. The book was based mainly on anecdotal information by memoirists.

			Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges. By his estimates, Stalinist purges had led to the deaths of some 20 million people. He later stated that the total number of deaths could "hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million."<ref>Robert Conquest, Preface, ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition'', Oxford University Press, USA, 2007. p. xviii</ref>
	The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party leaders such as ] and ]. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and had underlain books such as ]'s '']'' and ]'s '']''. Conquest claimed that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which, by his estimates, had led to the deaths of somewhere between 12 and 20 million people. This claim has been discredited by the declassified Soviet archives showing that these factors accounted for about 700 - 800 thousand deaths between 1937-38.

			Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals such as ] and ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ], as well as American ambassador ], accusing them of being dupes of Stalin and apologists of his regime. Conquest cites various comments made by them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.<ref>Robert Conquest, ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment'', Oxford University Press (1990) {{ISBN\|0-19-507132-8}}, pp. 466–75.</ref>
	The book was met with hostility for two main reasons: Conquest's sharp criticism of western intellectuals for "blindness" with respect to the Soviet Union, and Conquest's position that ] was a logical consequence of ], rather than an aberration from "true" ]. Historian J.Arch Getty critcized the research methods employed by Conquest as being devoid of any real evidence:

			After the opening up of the ], detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and revise ''The Great Terror'', Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled ''I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.'' In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Sir ]. The new version was published in 1990 as ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment''; {{ISBN\|0-19-507132-8}}.<ref>Conquest, Robert.
	''Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence. Conquest goes on to say that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with another. This procedure would be sound only if rumors were not repeated and if memoirists did not read each other's works'' <ref>J.Arch Getty, ''The Origins of the Great Purges'', p.222</ref>
			, '']'', 12 April 2007.</ref> The American historian ] disagreed, writing in 1993 that the archives did not support Conquest's casualty figures.<ref name="getty">{{cite journal \| title=Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence \| journal=] \|date=October 1993 \| volume=98 \| issue=4 \| pages=1043 \|author1=] \|author2=Gábor T. Rittersporn \|author3=] \|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/GTY-Penal_System.pdf \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080828071544/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/GTY-Penal_System.pdf \|archive-date=2008-08-28 \|url-status=live\|doi=10.2307/2166597 \|jstor=2166597}}</ref> In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Robert Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by the ].<ref name="defty">{{cite book \|last=Defty \|first=Andrew \|date=2 Dec 2013 \|title=Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department \|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dQ9EAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA3 \|location= \|publisher=Routledge \|page=3 \|isbn=978-1317791690}}</ref>
			According to ] ''The Great Terror'' was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them".<ref name="Brown"/>

			Many aspects of his book continue ] by ] historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history, such as ], who insists that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are too high, even in his reassessments.<ref name=":0">{{cite journal\|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G. \|title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word\|journal= ]\|volume= 51\|issue= 2 \|year=1999\|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070704065523/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf \|archive-date=2007-07-04 \|url-status=live\|pages=340–342\|doi=10.1080/09668139999056}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{cite journal\|author=Wheatcroft, S. G. \|title=The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest\|journal= Europe-Asia Studies\|volume=52 \|issue=6\|pages=1143–1159\|year=2000\|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Comments_KEP_CNQ.pdf \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080828071704/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Comments_KEP_CNQ.pdf \|archive-date=2008-08-28 \|url-status=live\|doi=10.1080/09668130050143860\|pmid=19326595\|s2cid=205667754}}</ref> In 2000, ], whose family had emigrated from Russia as a result of the ], wrote "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure."<ref name="Ignatieff">{{cite journal\|last1=Ignatieff\|first1=Michael\|title=The Man Who Was Right\|journal=New York Review of Books\|date=23 March 2000\|volume=47\|issue=5\|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/mar/23/the-man-who-was-right/\|accessdate=7 October 2015}}</ref> Conservative historian ], one of ]'s closest advisers, described Conquest as "our greatest living historian". And, in the phrase of ], he was ] before Solzhenitsyn.<ref name="Brown"/>
	Conquest's views have come into sharp conflict with qualified scholars of Soviet history. Stephen Wheatcroft wrote about Conquest in concern declassified archival documents:

			In 1996 Marxist historian ], who had been previously attacked by Conquest for his book '']'',<ref>{{cite news \|last=Moyihan \|first=Michael C. \|author-link=Michael C. Moynihan \|date=20 August 2011 \|title=How a True Believer Keeps the Faith \|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512722707621288 \|newspaper=] \|accessdate=9 January 2012}}</ref> praised Conquest's ''The Great Terror'' "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror". However he expressed the view that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available". As a result, he wrote, there was no need for "fragmentary sources" and "guesswork". "hen better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones."<ref name="Hobsbawm">{{cite book \|last=Hobsbawm \|first=Eric \|date=2011 \|title=On History \|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WVuIyMVegT8C \|location= \|publisher=Hachette UK \|page=Chapter 19 \|isbn=978-1780220512}}</ref> In 2002 Conquest replied to his ]: ''"They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire."''<ref name="The National Review">{{cite web\|url=http://www.nationalreview.com/article/215908/robert-conquest-an-appreciation\|title=Robert Conquest an appreciation\|date=5 August 2015 \|publisher=nationalreview.com\|accessdate=18 September 2015}}</ref>
	''He is wrong in suggesting that the data in these reports can be easily shown to be false, and so should be dismissed as fabricated and of no use.''

			===''The Harvest of Sorrow'' (1986)===
	Conquest refused to accept the assertion made by ], and supported by many Western leftists, that Stalin and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the Revolution and were contrary to the principles of ]. Conquest argued that ] was a natural consequence of the system established by ], although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. ] noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme."
			{{Main\|The Harvest of Sorrow}}

			In 1986 Conquest published '']'', dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in ] and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to ], ] to ]s, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> According to historians ] and ], "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Nevertheless, he wrote to them in a letter in 2003 that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."<ref>{{Cite journal\|last=Wheatcroft\|first=Stephen\|date=June 2006\|title=Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33: A Reply to Ellman\|url=https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS2319/h16/pensumliste/stalin-and-the-soviet-famine-of-1932-33_-a-reply-to-ellman.pdf \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170818094844/http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS2319/h16/pensumliste/stalin-and-the-soviet-famine-of-1932-33_-a-reply-to-ellman.pdf \|archive-date=2017-08-18 \|url-status=live\|journal=Europe-Asia Studies\|volume=58\|issue=4\|pages=625–633\|via=JSTOR}}</ref><ref>{{cite book \|last1= Wheatcroft \|first1=Stephen G.\|last2=Davies \|first2= R. W. \|author-link= \|date=2016 \|title= The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933\|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4s1lCwAAQBAJ&dq=the%20years%20of%20hunger&pg=PA441 \|location= \|publisher=] \|page=441 \|isbn=9780230273979}}</ref>
	Conquest sharply criticised Western intellectuals for what he saw as their blindness towards the realities of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and in the 1960s. Figures such as ] and ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] and ] were accused of being dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime for various comments they had allgedly made denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges. Conquest's comment about the poet ], who had been killed in the ] and was a hero of the British intellectual Left, that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa," was widely quoted.

			===''Stalin and the Kirov Murder'' (1989)===
	Some Communists continue to deny the claims made in ''The Great Terror'', despite their vindication by Russian and other historians following the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Soviet archives. In an attempt to discredit Conquest's work, communist writers accuse him of relying on Nazi collaborators, émigrés, and the CIA, and characterize his work with British intelligence and the Foreign Office as production of anti-Soviet propaganda. One communist critic of Conquest is ], whose book ''Another view of Stalin'' is available online. Moreover, many revisionist historians, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, have attempted to offer a broader perspective on the Purges: they argue that forces 'from below' were equally important in perpetuating and expanding the cycles of Purges, and that Stalin himself signed only several hundred death warrants personally.
			For the ], Kirov's murder was the Stalinist equivalent of the ], deliberately started by the Nazis to justify the arrest of German Communists. The Trotskyist-] view became the dominant one among western historians, popularised in Robert Conquest's influential books.<ref name=Priestland>{{cite journal\|last1=Priestland\|first1=David\|title=The Kirov Murder and Soviet History\|journal=History Today\|date=May 2011\|volume=61\|issue=5\|url=http://www.historytoday.com/blog/books-blog/david-priestland/kirov-murder-and-soviet-history\|accessdate=27 September 2015}}</ref>

			In '']'', Conquest already undermined the official Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, ], one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.
	==Later works==
	In 1986, Conquest published ''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine'', another exhaustively researched work, dealing with the collectivisation of agriculture under Stalin's direction in 1929-31, in which millions of peasants died of starvation or through deportation to labour camps. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was disintegrating, and access to first-hand accounts and archives in ] and ] was far easier. This meant that this book was more thoroughly based in archival sources than it was possible for ''The Great Terror'' to have been, and also that it attracted much less publicity, and certainly less hostile comment, than the earlier book.

			He returned to this in ''Stalin and the Kirov Murder'' (1989), where he argued that Stalin not only sanctioned Kirov's assassination, but used it as a justification for the terror that culminated in 1937–38, though no evidence has been found to confirm Stalin's role in the murder.<ref name="Homberger"/><ref name="Figes">''The Whisperers'', Orlando Figes, Allen Lane 2007, p. 236n</ref><ref name="Getty on Kirov">Getty, J. Arch, ''Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-38,'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 207.</ref>
	Robert Conquest's estimations of the demographic impact of the famine and collectivization have come into sharp conflict with the declassified Soviet documents. In "Harvest of Sorrow", Conquest claimed that 14.5 million peasants died as a result of famine and collectivization. However, the declassified archival documents show that only 1.8 million peasants were subject to deportation by dekulakization in 1930-31 while 2 million excess deaths were recorded in 1933.

			==Poetry and literature==
	In this book, Conquest was even more scathing about western intellectuals than he had been in ''The Great Terror''. He accused them of denying the full scale of the famine (see ]) , attacking their views as "an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale." He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: "Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act."
			===Poems===
			In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a well-regarded poet<ref>David Yezzi, ''Yale Review'', Volume 98, Issue 2 (April 2010), p. 183 ff.<!-- ISBN needed --></ref> whose poems have been published in various periodicals from 1937. In 1945 he was awarded the PEN Brazil Prize for his war poem "For the Death of a Poet" – about an army friend, the poet Drummond Allison, killed in Italy – and, in 1951, he received a Festival of Britain verse prize.<ref>{{cite web\|url=http://waywiser-press.com/conquest.html\|title=Robert Conquest, ''Penultimata'': Note on Robert Conquest\|publisher=waywiser-press.com\|url-status=dead\|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20140115171724/http://waywiser-press.com/conquest.html\|archivedate=15 January 2014}}</ref> During his lifetime, he had seven volumes of poetry<ref>{{cite news\|url=http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/conquest-historian-poet-081610.html\|title=Stanford legend Robert Conquest: new books at 93 for the historian and poet\|work=Stanford Report\|date=16 August 2010\|accessdate=4 August 2015\|first=Cynthia\|last=Haven}}</ref> and one of literary criticism<ref>{{cite web\|url=http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/speakers-and-events/biography/robert-conquest\|title=Robert Conquest\|publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum\|accessdate=4 August 2015}}</ref> published.

			Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as ] which also included ] and ]. Movement poets, many of whom bristled at being so labeled, rejected the experiments of earlier practitioners such as ].<ref name="WSJ 4" />
	After the full opening of the Soviet archives in the later years of the rule of ], Conquest was able to publish ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment'', a consideration of his 1968 book in the light of newly available evidence. He concluded (as other post-Soviet scholars have done) that the account he had given of the purges was broadly correct, and that if anything the figures he had given for the loss of life during the Stalin years had been an underestimate. Although some aspects of his work continue to be disputed, no such dispute reaches the magnitude of the one during the 1960s, and he is often regarded as having been vindicated by history. ] wrote in the '']'': "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure."

			He edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influential ''New Lines'' anthologies, introducing works by them, as well as ], ], and others, to a wider public.<ref>Zachary Leader, ed., ''The Movement Reconsidered'', Oxford University Press, 2009.</ref> He spent 1959–60 as visiting poet at the ]. Several of his poems were published in ''The New Oxford Book of Light Verse'' (1978; compiled by Amis), under the pseudonyms "Stuart Howard-Jones", "Victor Gray" and "Ted Pauker".{{cn\|reason=old source not suitable for factual claims\|date=March 2020}}
	Conquest's most recent works are ''Stalin and the ] Murder'' (1989), ''Stalin: Breaker of Nations'' (1991), ''History, Humanity, and Truth'' (1993) ,''Reflections on a Ravaged Century'' (1999) and ''The Dragons of Expectation'' (2004). The last two works may be seen as his summation of his career. In this last work he devotes more attention (in the section "The Great Error: Soviet Myths and Western Minds") to the attraction that totalitarian systems of thought seem to hold for many western intellectuals. He traces this attitude back to the ] and its culmination in the ]. Even sympathetic reviewers, however, commented that Conquest's political philosophy was largely a re-hashing of the works of ], and that Conquest's real strength was in empirical history.

			It emerged from the pages of poet ]'s ] that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography in the 1950s.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> When Larkin was in Hull, Conquest sent him judicious selections of the latest pornography, and, when he came down to London, Conquest took him on shopping trips to the Soho porn shops.<ref name="Homberger"/> On one occasion Conquest, in 1957, 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.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> The true story of the joke became in 2008, '']'', a comedy radio play by Chris Harrald.<ref>{{cite web \|author=BBC Radio 4 Publicity \|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/radio/wk18/tue.shtml \|title=Mr Larkin's Awkward Day \|publisher=] \| date=29 April 2008}}</ref>

			Soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, ] met with Conquest, asking him to translate a 'little' poem of his into English verse. This was "]" – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre – published in 1977.<ref>Robert Conquest, 'Solzhenitsyn, A Genius with a Blindspot', ''Sunday Times'', 10 August 2008; p. A15</ref>

			A new ''Collected Poems'', edited by Elizabeth Conquest, was published in March 2020 by the Waywiser Press.<ref></ref>

			===Novels===
			Conquest had been a member of the ] since the 1940s, and shared Amis's taste for science fiction. Starting from 1961, the two writers jointly edited ''Spectrum'', five anthologies of new sci-fi writing.<ref name="Homberger"/> Conquest also proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel that Conquest had completed. This was revised by Amis, then it appeared under both their names as ''The Egyptologists'' (1965).<ref name="Homberger"/> The novel is about a secret Egyptological London society that is really a husbands' organization serving as an alibi for philanderers.<ref name="WSJ 4"/><ref name="LA Times">{{cite news \|last=Hillier \|first=Bevis \|author-link=Bevis Hillier \|date=19 November 1986 \|title=Harvest' of Soviet Terrorism Reaped by Historian Conquest \|url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-11-19-vw-4241-story.html \|newspaper=] \|access-date=4 October 2015}}</ref> A reviewer in '']'' felt that their "elaborate little jokes leave an unpleasant taste".<ref name="Homberger"/>

			Later a film version of the novel was cancelled when its star, ], was called away to Hollywood.<ref name="The National Review 2">{{cite web\|last1=O'Sullivan\|first1=John\|title=What to Make of the Guardian's Shameful Robert Conquest Obituary?\|url=http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422574/robert-conquest-guardian-obituary\|website=National Review\|date=14 August 2015 \|publisher=nationalreview.com\|accessdate=27 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest published a science-fiction novel, ''A World of Difference'' (1955).<ref name="NYTobit"/>

			==Political works==
			===''What to Do When the Russians Come'' (1984)===
			In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, with ], the fictional book ''What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide'' which, however, was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion. This book, as many other works of the mid-1980s in different media, like Sir ]'s '']'', the movie '']'', and the ] game '']'', starts from the premise that a Soviet ground-invasion of the United States could be imminent and that the Soviet Union was about to engulf the world.

			<blockquote>It is widely accepted that the United States now faces a real possibility of succumbing to the power of an alien regime unless the right policies are pursued. is, first, to show the American citizen clearly and factually what the results of this possible Soviet domination could be and how it would affect him or her personally; and second, to give some serious advice on how to survive."<ref name="russians come 1">{{cite book\|last1=Conquest\|first1=Robert\|last2=Manchip White\|first2=Jon\|title=What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide\|date=1984\|publisher=Stein and Day\|isbn=0812829859\|page=\|url=https://archive.org/details/whattodowhenruss00conq\|url-access=registration\|accessdate=24 September 2015}}</ref></blockquote>

			Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear field ] was only possibly matching USSR military power:

			<blockquote>We live in dangerous times. Such miscalculations are very possible. But they are not inevitable. The American people and their representatives have it in their power to prevent their country from undergoing the ordeal we have described. A democratic government, with all its distractions and disadvantages, ... It is not infallible, it is slow to learn, and it is willing to grasp at comfortable illusions; but it may yet act decisively"<ref name="russians come 2">{{cite book\|last1=Conquest\|first1=Robert\|last2=Manchip White\|first2=Jon\|title=What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide\|date=1984\|publisher=Stein and Day\|isbn=0812829859\|page=\|url=https://archive.org/details/whattodowhenruss00conq\|url-access=registration\|accessdate=24 September 2015}}</ref>

			"But why should we fear that such an ordeal may face us? The economic potential of the West in gross national product is far greater than that of the Soviet Union....In fact, the Soviet Union is economically far behind the United States. American technology is always a generation ahead of theirs. They have to turn to the United States for wheat. The Soviet economy is at a dead end. The Communist system has failed to win support in any of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet idea has no attractions. On any calculation—of economic power or social advance or intellectual progress there could be no question of the Russians imposing their will. But in terms of actual military power, the West's advantage does not seem to have been made use of. It is at least matched, and many would say overmatched, in the nuclear field; the Western forces in Europe have less than half the striking power of their opponents. It is no good our being more advanced than they are if this is not translated into power—both military power and political willpower."<ref name="russians come 3">{{cite book\|last1=Conquest\|first1=Robert\|last2=Manchip White\|first2=Jon\|title=What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide\|date=1984\|publisher=Stein and Day\|isbn=0812829859\|pages=–177\|url=https://archive.org/details/whattodowhenruss00conq\|url-access=registration\|accessdate=24 September 2015}}</ref></blockquote>

			In 1986 Conquest affirmed that "a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us."<ref name="LA Times" />

			===''Reflections on a Ravaged Century'' (1999)===
			{{external media\| float = right\| video1 = , ]\| video2 = , ]}}
			'''' is a book devoted to the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.<ref name="TLS Hitchens">{{cite news\|last1=Hitchens\|first1=Christopher\|title=Against sinister perfectionism\|agency=The Times Literary Supplement\|url=http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/against-sinister-perfectionism/\|date=26 November 1999\|accessdate=25 May 2016}}</ref>

			There is much more in this book about communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest's greater expertise on communism, and partly because comparatively few Western intellectuals became Nazis. He focuses mainly on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became communists because they felt or believed that this was "anti-fascism" or "anti-Nazism".<ref name="TLS Hitchens"/>

			===Laws of politics===
			{{anchor\|Three Laws of Politics}}
			{{anchor\|Two Laws of Politics}}
			Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations:<ref name="Vogel"/>
			# Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.
			# Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

			Conquest's first and second law are attested by at least two sources.<ref name="Vogel">{{cite web\|last=Vogel\|first=Martin\|date=17 December 2018\|url=https://vogelwakefield.com/2018/12/tracking-down-conquests-law-on-organisations/\|title=Tracking down Conquest's law on organisations\|website=Vogel Wakefield\|accessdate=13 October 2021\|archive-date=11 October 2021\|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211011090917/https://vogelwakefield.com/2018/12/tracking-down-conquests-law-on-organisations/\|url-status=live}}</ref> On 14 February 2003, ] wrote of Conquest's campaign against the expansion of university education that "rom this period dates 'Conquest's Law', which states that 'Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands'. This was later supplemented with the balancing rule that every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents."<ref name="Brown"/> In his 1991 ''Memoirs'', ] wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.' (The Second Law, more recent, says, 'Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.')"<ref>{{cite book\|last=Amis\|first=Kingsley\|year=2012\|orig-year=1991\|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_neTtBlqCU4C\|title=Memoirs\|edition=E-book\|publisher=Random House\|page=146\|isbn=9781446414668\|accessdate=13 October 2021\|via=Google Books}}</ref>

			On 25 June 2003, ] wrote in the '']''{{'}}s blog ''The Corner'' that "s best I can remember", Conquest conjectured three laws of politics:<ref>{{cite web\|last=Derbyshire\|first=John\|date=25 June 2003\|url=https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/conquests-laws-john-derbyshire/\|title=Conquest's Laws\|website=National Review\|accessdate=13 October 2021\|archive-date=11 October 2021\|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211011090915/https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/conquests-laws-john-derbyshire/\|url-status=live}}</ref>
			# Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
			# Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
			# The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

			Derbyshire commented: "Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the ] and ] as examples. Of the third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually ''IS'' controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar ]." For these statements, Conquest would become well known among certain thinkers, especially online ]s; however, Derbyshire cited no source for them and implied his memory was not certain on the matter. Indeed, the second law given here is ], which was stated by ] in his article "O'Sullivan's First Law" in the 27 October 1989 print issue of the '']'', in which he also references Derbyshire's Conquest's third law as Conquest's second law:
			{{blockquote\|text=That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ], the ], and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's ] takes over — and the rest follows.

			Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):

			The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Examples: virtually any conservative party anywhere, the ] for Mayor campaign, and the British secret service. That last example is, however, flawed, since the British secret service actually was controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies in the form of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al. In which case, Conquest's Law should have operated to make M1-6 a crack anti-Soviet intelligence service of James Bond proportions. But these are deep waters.<ref>{{cite web\|last=O'Sullivan\|first=John\|date=27 October 1989\|url=http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-jos062603.asp\|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100715191034/http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-jos062603.asp\|archivedate=15 July 2010\|url-status=dead\|title=Conquest's Laws\|website=National Review\|accessdate=13 October 2021}}</ref>}}

			==Personal life==
			Conquest was married four times, first in 1942 to Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1948.<ref name=Telegraphobit>{{cite news \|title=Robert Conquest, historian – obituary \|url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11782719/Robert-Conquest-historian-obituary.html \|work=The Daily Telegraph \|date=4 August 2015 \|archiveurl=https://archive.today/20150804203217/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11782719/Robert-Conquest-historian-obituary.html \|archivedate=4 August 2015}}</ref> There followed a marriage to Tatiana Mihailova (1948–1962),<ref name=Telegraphobit/> whom he had helped escape from Bulgaria.<ref name=NYTobit/> She was diagnosed with ] in 1951. In 1962 he married Caroleen MacFarlane; they divorced in 1978.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> That year he began dating Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a ] colonel. He and Wingate married in 1979. When he died in 2015, he had several grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter.<ref name="NYTobit"/><ref name="Brown">{{cite news \|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23 \|title=Scourge and poet \|first=Andrew \|last=Brown \|author-link=Andrew Brown (writer) \|newspaper=The Guardian \|date=15 February 2003 \|accessdate=4 August 2015}}</ref>

	==Later life==		==Later life==
			] with ] (middle) and ] (right) at the ], November 2005]]
	In 1962, Conquest was divorced from his second wife and, in 1964, he married Caroleen MacFarlane. This marriage was dissolved in 1978 and, in 1979, he married Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a ] colonel. This marriage proved lasting. In 1981, Conquest moved to ] to take up a post at the ] at ], a traditional home of anti-Communist scholarship on Russia, and has lived there ever since.

	Conquest is ~~now~~ ~~senior~~ ~~research~~ ~~fellow~~ and ~~scholar~~-~~curator~~ of the Russian and ] Collection at ~~the~~ Hoover Institution. He is ~~also~~ an ~~adjunct~~ fellow of the ] in ]~~, and~~ a research associate of ]'s Ukrainian Research Institute. He is a ~~member~~ of ~~the~~ ~~board~~ of ~~the~~ ]. He is a ~~fellow~~ of ~~the~~ ~~British~~ ~~Interplanetary~~ ~~Society~~ ~~and~~ a ~~member~~ of ~~the~~ ~~Society~~ ~~for~~ ~~the~~ ~~Promotion~~ of ~~Roman~~ ~~Studies~~ ~~and~~ ~~the~~ ~~American~~ ~~Association~~ for ~~the~~ ~~Advancement of Slavic Studies.~~		In 1981 Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University's ], where he remained a Fellow.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In 1985 he signed a petition in support of the anti-Communist ] (]).<ref>{{cite web\|url=https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/document/bhlnicaragua\|title=Quand Bernard-Henri Lévy pétitionnait contre le régime légal du Nicaragua\|date=1 October 2009\|publisher=}}</ref> He was a fellow of the ]'s Russian Institute, and of the ]; a distinguished visiting scholar at ]; a research associate of ]'s Ukrainian Research Institute.<ref name="NYTobit"/> In 1990 he presented ''Red Empire'', a seven-part mini-series on the Soviet Union produced by ].<ref>{{cite web\| url = http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/redempire.html\| title = Red Empire\| author = McCannon, John\| date = Fall 1998\| accessdate = 23 June 2014\| publisher = The Journal for Multi Media History}}</ref>

			Conquest died in 2015 in ], at the age of 98, of respiratory failure as a result of ].<ref name="NYTobit">{{cite news \|last=Grimes \|first=William \|author-link=William Grimes (journalist) \|date=4 August 2015 \|title=Robert Conquest, Historian Who Documented Soviet Horrors, Dies at 98 \|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/arts/international/robert-conquest-historian-who-documented-soviet-horrors-dies-at-98.html \|newspaper=The New York Times \|archive-url=https://archive.today/20160516144031/http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/arts/international/robert-conquest-historian-who-documented-soviet-horrors-dies-at-98.html?_r=0 \|archive-date=16 May 2016 \|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="WSJ 4">{{cite news \|last1=Cronin \|first1=Brenda \|last2=Cullison \|first2=Alan \|date=4 August 2015 \|title=Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98 \|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-conquest-seminal-historian-of-soviet-misrule-dies-at-98-1438714647 \|newspaper=] \|accessdate=4 August 2015}}</ref>
	Conquest has remained a British citizen and, in 1996, he was made a ]. His other awards and honors include the Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, the Richard Weaver Award for Scholary Letters and the ] Award. Conquest has a substantial reputation as a poet. He has brought out six volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal ''New Lines'' anthologies, and published a verse translation of ]'s epic ''Prussian Nights''. He received the ] Award in 1997. He is a fellow of the ] and the ]. He is a frequent contributor to the '']'', the '']'' and other journals. When a revised edition of ''The Great Terror'' appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, Conquest was asked by his publisher to suggest a new title. Conquest allegedly replied, "How about 'I told you so, you fucking fools'?" In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Kingsley Amis, but Conquest calls it a "gem."

	In November 2005, Conquest was awarded the ] by ].

			==Awards and honors==
	'''Acknowledgement'''
			Conquest was a Fellow of the ], the ], the ], and the ], and a Member of the ].<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

			His honours include
	Much of the biographical material in this article is drawn from Andrew Brown, "Scourge and Poet, a profile of Robert Conquest," which appeared in '']'' in February 2003 (see link below).
			* ] (2005)<ref>{{cite web\|url=https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051103-5.html \|title=Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients \|publisher=Georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov \|accessdate=14 January 2014}}</ref>
			* Companion of the ] (CMG; 1996)<ref>{{London Gazette \|issue=54255 \|date=29 December 1995 \|page=3 \|supp=y}}</ref>
			* Officer of the ] (OBE; 1955])<ref>{{London Gazette \|issue=40366 \|date=31 December 1954 \|page=13 \|supp=y}}</ref>
			* Commander Cross of the ] (2009)<ref name=Telegraphobit/>
			* Estonian ] (2008)
			* Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005).<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2006/390616.shtml \|title=Ukraine honors Robert Conquest with Presidential Medal of Honor \|publisher=Ukrweekly.com \|date=24 September 2006 \|accessdate=14 January 2014 \|archive-date=3 March 2016 \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303224059/http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2006/390616.shtml \|url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite web\|url=http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/june21/ppl-062106.html \|title=''Stanford Report'', 21 June 2006 \|publisher=News.stanford.edu \|date=21 June 2006 \|accessdate=14 January 2014}}</ref>
			*'']'', by ], the final volume in Powell's 12 volume sequence, ], is dedicated to Conquest. <ref>Jay, Mike. (2013) "Who Were the Dedicatees of Powell’s Works?" ''The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter.''50 (spring): 9-10. </ref>
			*A street in (the Ukrainian city of) ] was renamed after Robert Conquest in February 2024<ref>{{cite web\|title=Streets of world-famous researchers of the Holodomor appeared in Dnipro\|url=https://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2024/02/7/163623/\|date=7 February 2024\|access-date=9 February 2024\|lang=Ukrainian\|website=]}}</ref>

			His awards include:
	==References==
			* Selection by the ] to deliver the 1993 ] (the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities)
	<div class="references-small"><references/></div>
			* Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters (1999)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ] (American Academy of Arts & Letters,1997)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ] (2012).<ref>{{cite web\|url=http://www.dandavidprize.org \|title=The Dan David Prize: Laureates 2012:Robert Conquest \|work=dandavidprize.org \|accessdate=6 August 2015 \|url-status=dead \|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120425145608/http://www.dandavidprize.org/laureates/laureates-2012/128-2012-past-historybiography/339--robert-conquest.html \|archivedate=25 April 2012 }}</ref>
			*Conquest was a member of the advisory council of the ].<ref>''National Advisory Council''. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 20 May 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2011.</ref>
			* ] (1987)

	==~~Historical~~ works==		==Selected works==
			'''Historical and political'''
	(Dates shown are not necessarily the dates of first publication)
			{{refbegin\|26em\|normalfont=yes}}
			* '']'' (1960)
			* '''' (1961)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities'' (1960)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1961)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1965)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1967)
			* '''' (1967)
			* '''' (1967)
			* '''' (1968)
			* '''' (1968)
			* '''' (1968)
			* '''' (1968)
			* '''' (1968)
			* '']'' (1968)
			** ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment'' (1990)<ref name="Brown"/>
			** ''The Great Terror: 40th Anniversary Edition'' (2008)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1970)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1970)
			* '''' (Prepared for the ], of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1970)
			* '''' (1972)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''The Russian Tradition'' (with Tibor Szamuely, 1974)
			* '''' (1979)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1979)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1980)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''The Man-made Famine in Ukraine'' (with ], Michael Novak and Dana Dalrymple, 1984)
			* ''What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide'' (with ], 1984)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939'' (1985)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '']'' (1986)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future'' (1986)
			* '''' (1989)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Stalin and the Kirov Murder'' (1989)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '']'' (1991)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''History, Humanity, and Truth'' (1993)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* '''' (1999)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History'', ] (2004), {{ISBN\|0-393-05933-2}}
			{{refend}}

			'''Journal articles'''
	*''Common Sense About Russia'' (1960)
			* ''Foreign Affairs'', ''46''(4), pp. 733–742.
	*''Power and Politics in the USSR'' (1960)
			* (1970) ''Foreign Affairs'', ''48''(3), pp. 509–524.
	*''Soviet Deportation of Nationalities'' (1960)
			* (1975) ''Foreign Affairs'', ''53''(3), pp. 482–497.
	*''Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair'' (1961)
			* (1987) The Russian Review, ''46''(4), pp.386-390.
	*''Industrial Workers in the USSR'' (1967)
			* . (1993) ''The National Interest'', ''31'', pp. 91–98.
	*''Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice'' (1967)
			* . (1999) ''The National Interest'', (57), pp. 64–70.
	*''Agricultural Workers in the USSR'' (1968)
			* . (2004) ''The National Interest'', (78), pp. 29–32.
	*''The Soviet Police System'' (1968)
	*''Religion in the USSR'' (1968)
	*''The Soviet Political System'' (1968)
	*''Justice and the Legal System in the USSR'' (1968)
	*'']'' (1968)
	*''The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities'' (1970)
	*''Where Marx Went Wrong'' (1970)
	*''Lenin'' (1972)
	*''Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps'' (1978)
	*''Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939'' (1985)
	*
	*''Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth'' (1989)
	*''Stalin and the Kirov Murder'' (1989)
	*'']'' (1990)
	*''Stalin: Breaker of Nations'' (1991)
	*''History, Humanity, and Truth'' (1993)
	*''Reflections on a Ravaged Century'' (1999)
	*''The Dragons of Expectation'' (2004)

			'''Poetry'''
	==External links==
			* ''Poems'' (1956)<ref name="Brown"/>
	*
			* ''Back to Life: Poems from behind the Iron Curtain'' as translator/editor (1958)
	*
			* ''Between Mars and Venus'' (1962)<ref name="Brown"/>
	* (Article by Robert Conquest at National Review Online)
			* ''Arias from a Love Opera, and Other Poems'' (1969)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Forays'' (1979)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''New and Collected Poems'' (1988)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Demons Don't'' (1999)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Penultimata'' (2009)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''A Garden of Erses'' (2010)<ref name="Brown"/>
			* ''Blokelore and Blokesongs'' (2012)<ref name="Brown"/>

			'''Novels'''
			* ''A World of Difference'' (1955)<ref name="NYTobit"/>
			* ''The Egyptologists'' (with Kingsley Amis, 1965)<ref name="NYTobit"/>

			'''Criticism'''
			* ''The Abomination of Moab'' (1979)<ref name="NYTobit"/>

			==References==
			{{Reflist\|26em}}

			==External links==
			{{wikiquote}}
			{{Commons category}}
			*{{IMDb name\|id=2184567}}
			* , a profile of Robert Conquest
			*
			* by Cynthia Haven, ''Stanford Report,'' August 16, 2010
			* , article by Robert Conquest at ''National Review Online''
			* at the ]
			*
			* at ]
			*
			*
			* . The Hoover Institution.
			* {{C-SPAN\|1990}}
			* ], & ] (2016). "Robert Conquest, 1917{{endash}}2015". ''Slavic Review''. ''75''(1), 238–239. {{doi\|10.5612/slavicreview.75.1.238}}

			{{1994 Shevchenko National Prize}}
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			{{Antonovych prize winners}}
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			{{Authority control}}
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	]		{{DEFAULTSORT:Conquest, Robert}}
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Latest revision as of 14:05, 8 December 2024

British-American historian and poet (1917–2015)

Robert Conquest CMG OBE FBA FRSL
Conquest in 1987
Born	George Robert Acworth Conquest (1917-07-15)15 July 1917 Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England
Died	3 August 2015(2015-08-03) (aged 98) Stanford, California, U.S.
Occupation	Historian poet
Citizenship	United Kingdom United States
Education	Winchester College Magdalen College, Oxford University of Grenoble
Notable works	The Great Terror (1968) The Harvest of Sorrow (1986)
Notable awards	See below
Spouse	Joan Watkins (m. 1942; div. 1948) Tatiana Mihailova (m. 1948; div. 1962) Caroleen MacFarlane (m. 1964; div. 1978) Elizabeth Wingate (m. 1979)
Children	3

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George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG OBE FBA FRSL (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet, and novelist. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books against Communism.

A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968); The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (1986); and Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.

Early life and education

Conquest was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to an American father, Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, and an English mother, Rosamund Alys Acworth. His father served in an American Ambulance Field Service unit with the French Army in World War I, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, with Silver Star in 1916.

Conquest was educated at Winchester College, where he won an exhibition to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Magdalen College, Oxford. He took a gap year, spending time at the University of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, and returning to Oxford in 1937, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Carlton Club. He was awarded an MA in PPE and a DLitt in history.

Career

War years

In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of the Second World War, Conquest returned to England. As the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on 20 April 1940, serving with the regiment until 1946.

In 1943 he was posted to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (later part of University College London) to study Bulgarian. The following year he was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to the Allied Control Commission. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia where he remained as the press officer. In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.

Information Research Department

In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the Labour Attlee government in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications." The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion. Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him. He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.

In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached George Orwell for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. Orwell's list, discovered after her death in 2002, included Guardian and Observer journalists, as well as E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin. Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems. One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of Donald Maclean, one 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 several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on in The Great Terror. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts – a Communist Tactic". In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.

Writing

In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian. After he left, he says, the Information Research Department (IRD) suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book. During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London by the Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series. Many of his Foreign Office works were published this way. 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 request of the CIA, in addition to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Đilas, Howard Fast, and Charles Patrick Fitzgerald.

In 1962–1963 Conquest was literary editor of The Spectator, but he resigned when he found the job interfering with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union were Common Sense About Russia (1960), The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960) and Power and Policy in the USSR (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961) and Russia After Khrushchev (1965).

Historical works

The Great Terror (1968)

Main article: The Great Terror (book)

In 1968 Conquest published what became his best-known work, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938. Many reviewers at the time were not impressed by his way of writing about the Great Terror, which was in the tradition of "great men who make history". The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the period 1956–64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census.

The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev, who were executed shortly thereafter. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges. By his estimates, Stalinist purges had led to the deaths of some 20 million people. He later stated that the total number of deaths could "hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million."

Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser, Bertolt Brecht, Owen Lattimore, and Romain Rolland, as well as American ambassador Joseph Davies, accusing them of being dupes of Stalin and apologists of his regime. Conquest cites various comments made by them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.

After the opening up of the Soviet archives, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and revise The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Sir Kingsley Amis. The new version was published in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment; ISBN 0-19-507132-8. The American historian J. Arch Getty disagreed, writing in 1993 that the archives did not support Conquest's casualty figures. In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Robert Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by the IRD. According to Denis Healey The Great Terror was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them".

Many aspects of his book continue to be disputed by sovietologist historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history, such as Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who insists that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are too high, even in his reassessments. In 2000, Michael Ignatieff, whose family had emigrated from Russia as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure." Conservative historian Paul Johnson, one of Thatcher's closest advisers, described Conquest as "our greatest living historian". And, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash, he was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn.

In 1996 Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who had been previously attacked by Conquest for his book Age of Extremes, praised Conquest's The Great Terror "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror". However he expressed the view that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available". As a result, he wrote, there was no need for "fragmentary sources" and "guesswork". "hen better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones." In 2002 Conquest replied to his revisionist critics: "They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire."

The Harvest of Sorrow (1986)

Main article: The Harvest of Sorrow

In 1986 Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Nevertheless, he wrote to them in a letter in 2003 that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."

Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)

For the Trotskyists, Kirov's murder was the Stalinist equivalent of the Reichstag fire, deliberately started by the Nazis to justify the arrest of German Communists. The Trotskyist-Menshevik view became the dominant one among western historians, popularised in Robert Conquest's influential books.

In The Great Terror, Conquest already undermined the official Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.

He returned to this in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), where he argued that Stalin not only sanctioned Kirov's assassination, but used it as a justification for the terror that culminated in 1937–38, though no evidence has been found to confirm Stalin's role in the murder.

Poetry and literature

Poems

In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a well-regarded poet whose poems have been published in various periodicals from 1937. In 1945 he was awarded the PEN Brazil Prize for his war poem "For the Death of a Poet" – about an army friend, the poet Drummond Allison, killed in Italy – and, in 1951, he received a Festival of Britain verse prize. During his lifetime, he had seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism published.

Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as "The Movement" which also included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Movement poets, many of whom bristled at being so labeled, rejected the experiments of earlier practitioners such as Ezra Pound.

He edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influential New Lines anthologies, introducing works by them, as well as Thom Gunn, Dennis Enright, and others, to a wider public. He spent 1959–60 as visiting poet at the University of Buffalo. Several of his poems were published in The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978; compiled by Amis), under the pseudonyms "Stuart Howard-Jones", "Victor Gray" and "Ted Pauker".

It emerged from the pages of poet Philip Larkin's published letters that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography in the 1950s. When Larkin was in Hull, Conquest sent him judicious selections of the latest pornography, and, when he came down to London, Conquest took him on shopping trips to the Soho porn shops. On one occasion Conquest, in 1957, 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. The true story of the joke became in 2008, Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, a comedy radio play by Chris Harrald.

Soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn met with Conquest, asking him to translate a 'little' poem of his into English verse. This was "Prussian Nights" – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre – published in 1977.

A new Collected Poems, edited by Elizabeth Conquest, was published in March 2020 by the Waywiser Press.

Novels

Conquest had been a member of the British Interplanetary Society since the 1940s, and shared Amis's taste for science fiction. Starting from 1961, the two writers jointly edited Spectrum, five anthologies of new sci-fi writing. Conquest also proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel that Conquest had completed. This was revised by Amis, then it appeared under both their names as The Egyptologists (1965). The novel is about a secret Egyptological London society that is really a husbands' organization serving as an alibi for philanderers. A reviewer in The New York Times felt that their "elaborate little jokes leave an unpleasant taste".

Later a film version of the novel was cancelled when its star, Peter Sellers, was called away to Hollywood. Conquest published a science-fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955).

Political works

What to Do When the Russians Come (1984)

In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, with Jon Manchip White, the fictional book What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide which, however, was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion. This book, as many other works of the mid-1980s in different media, like Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, the movie Red Dawn, and the Milton Bradley game Fortress America, starts from the premise that a Soviet ground-invasion of the United States could be imminent and that the Soviet Union was about to engulf the world.

It is widely accepted that the United States now faces a real possibility of succumbing to the power of an alien regime unless the right policies are pursued. is, first, to show the American citizen clearly and factually what the results of this possible Soviet domination could be and how it would affect him or her personally; and second, to give some serious advice on how to survive."

Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear field NATO was only possibly matching USSR military power:

We live in dangerous times. Such miscalculations are very possible. But they are not inevitable. The American people and their representatives have it in their power to prevent their country from undergoing the ordeal we have described. A democratic government, with all its distractions and disadvantages, ... It is not infallible, it is slow to learn, and it is willing to grasp at comfortable illusions; but it may yet act decisively" "But why should we fear that such an ordeal may face us? The economic potential of the West in gross national product is far greater than that of the Soviet Union....In fact, the Soviet Union is economically far behind the United States. American technology is always a generation ahead of theirs. They have to turn to the United States for wheat. The Soviet economy is at a dead end. The Communist system has failed to win support in any of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet idea has no attractions. On any calculation—of economic power or social advance or intellectual progress there could be no question of the Russians imposing their will. But in terms of actual military power, the West's advantage does not seem to have been made use of. It is at least matched, and many would say overmatched, in the nuclear field; the Western forces in Europe have less than half the striking power of their opponents. It is no good our being more advanced than they are if this is not translated into power—both military power and political willpower."

In 1986 Conquest affirmed that "a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us."

Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)

External videos
Booknotes interview with Conquest on Reflections on a Ravaged Century, December 19, 1999, C-SPAN
Presentation by Conquest of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, January 19, 2000, C-SPAN

Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a book devoted to the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.

There is much more in this book about communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest's greater expertise on communism, and partly because comparatively few Western intellectuals became Nazis. He focuses mainly on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became communists because they felt or believed that this was "anti-fascism" or "anti-Nazism".

Laws of politics

Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations:

Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.
Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

Conquest's first and second law are attested by at least two sources. On 14 February 2003, Andrew Brown wrote of Conquest's campaign against the expansion of university education that "rom this period dates 'Conquest's Law', which states that 'Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands'. This was later supplemented with the balancing rule that every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents." In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.' (The Second Law, more recent, says, 'Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.')"

On 25 June 2003, John Derbyshire wrote in the National Review Online's blog The Corner that "s best I can remember", Conquest conjectured three laws of politics:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Derbyshire commented: "Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service." For these statements, Conquest would become well known among certain thinkers, especially online conservatives; however, Derbyshire cited no source for them and implied his memory was not certain on the matter. Indeed, the second law given here is O'Sullivan's first law, which was stated by John O'Sullivan in his article "O'Sullivan's First Law" in the 27 October 1989 print issue of the National Review, in which he also references Derbyshire's Conquest's third law as Conquest's second law:

That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.
Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):
The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Examples: virtually any conservative party anywhere, the Ronald Lauder for Mayor campaign, and the British secret service. That last example is, however, flawed, since the British secret service actually was controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies in the form of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al. In which case, Conquest's Law should have operated to make M1-6 a crack anti-Soviet intelligence service of James Bond proportions. But these are deep waters.

Personal life

Conquest was married four times, first in 1942 to Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1948. There followed a marriage to Tatiana Mihailova (1948–1962), whom he had helped escape from Bulgaria. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1951. In 1962 he married Caroleen MacFarlane; they divorced in 1978. That year he began dating Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a United States Air Force colonel. He and Wingate married in 1979. When he died in 2015, he had several grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter.

Later life

In 1981 Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow. In 1985 he signed a petition in support of the anti-Communist Contras (Nicaragua). He was a fellow of the Columbia University's Russian Institute, and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a distinguished visiting scholar at The Heritage Foundation; a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. In 1990 he presented Red Empire, a seven-part mini-series on the Soviet Union produced by Yorkshire Television.

Conquest died in 2015 in Stanford, California, at the age of 98, of respiratory failure as a result of Parkinson's disease.

Awards and honors

Conquest was a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and the British Interplanetary Society, and a Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

His honours include

Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005)
Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG; 1996)
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE; 1955])
Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2009)
Estonian Cross of Terra Mariana (2008)
Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005).
Hearing Secret Harmonies, by Anthony Powell, the final volume in Powell's 12 volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is dedicated to Conquest.
A street in (the Ukrainian city of) Dnipro was renamed after Robert Conquest in February 2024

His awards include:

Selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture (the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities)
Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters (1999)
Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts & Letters,1997)
Dan David Prize (2012).
Conquest was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Antonovych prize (1987)

Selected works

Historical and political

Common Sense About Russia (1960)
Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R.: The Study of Soviet Dynastics (1961)
The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960)
Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961)
Russia After Khrushchev (1965)
The Politics of Ideas in the USSR (1967)
Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (1967)
Industrial Workers in the USSR (1967)
Agricultural Workers in the USSR (1968)
Religion in the U.S.S.R. (1968)
The Soviet Political System (1968)
The Soviet Police System (1968)
Justice and the Legal System in the U.S.S.R. (1968)
The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
- The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990)
- The Great Terror: 40th Anniversary Edition (2008)
Where Marx Went Wrong (1970)
The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)
The Human Cost of Soviet Communism (Prepared for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1970)
V.I. Lenin (1972)
The Russian Tradition (with Tibor Szamuely, 1974)
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1979)
Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy (1979)
We & They: Civic & Despotic Cultures (1980)
The Man-made Famine in Ukraine (with James Mace, Michael Novak and Dana Dalrymple, 1984)
What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide (with Jon Manchip White, 1984)
Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939 (1985)
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (1986)
Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989)
Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)
Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991)
History, Humanity, and Truth (1993)
Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, W. W. Norton & Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2

Journal articles

The Limits of Detente. Foreign Affairs, 46(4), pp. 733–742.
Stalin's Successors. (1970) Foreign Affairs, 48(3), pp. 509–524.
A New Russia? A New World? (1975) Foreign Affairs, 53(3), pp. 482–497.
Revisionizing Stalin's Russia. (1987) The Russian Review, 46(4), pp.386-390.
Academe and the Soviet Myth. (1993) The National Interest, 31, pp. 91–98.
Toward an English-Speaking Union. (1999) The National Interest, (57), pp. 64–70.
Downloading Democracy. (2004) The National Interest, (78), pp. 29–32.

Poetry

Poems (1956)
Back to Life: Poems from behind the Iron Curtain as translator/editor (1958)
Between Mars and Venus (1962)
Arias from a Love Opera, and Other Poems (1969)
Forays (1979)
New and Collected Poems (1988)
Demons Don't (1999)
Penultimata (2009)
A Garden of Erses (2010)
Blokelore and Blokesongs (2012)

Novels

A World of Difference (1955)
The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis, 1965)

Criticism

The Abomination of Moab (1979)

References

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"Stanford historian Robert Conquest, expert on Soviet Union, dies at 98". Stanford University.
Encyclopedia of British Writers, 19th and 20th Centuries by Christine L. Krueger page 87
Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Volume 2 By R. Reginald, Douglas Menville, Mary A. Burgess
Supplement to the Alumni Register (October 1920), "Pennsylvania; A Record of the University's Men in the Great War", University of Pennsylvania General Alumni Society, 1920, page 40.
^ Brown, Andrew (15 February 2003). "Scourge and poet". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
"Robert Conquest". Hoover Institution. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
"Vale Robert Conquest, Historian and Poet". Quadrant. quadrant.org.au. 4 August 2015. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
"No. 34837". The London Gazette (Supplement). 23 April 1940. p. 2459.
^ "Robert Conquest, historian – obituary". The Daily Telegraph. 4 August 2015. Archived from the original on 4 August 2015.
^ Leigh, David (27 January 1978). "Death of the department that never was". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 September 2015.
Timothy Garton Ash. "Orwell's List" (review), New York Review of Books, 23 September 2003.
^ Samuelson, Lennart. "A pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet studies during the Cold War". Baltic Worlds. Retrieved 22 September 2015.
^ Homberger, Eric (5 August 2015). "Robert Conquest obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 September 2015.
Lyons, Richard D. (5 June 1994). "Frederick A. Praeger Dies at 78; Published Books on Communism". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
Conquest, Robert (1968). The Great Terror (1st ed.).
^ Cronin, Brenda; Cullison, Alan (4 August 2015). "Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
Robert Conquest, Preface, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, USA, 2007. p. xviii
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press (1990) ISBN 0-19-507132-8, pp. 466–75.
Conquest, Robert. "Letter to the Editors", The New York Review of Books, 12 April 2007.
J. Arch Getty; Gábor T. Rittersporn; Viktor N. Zemskov (October 1993). "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1043. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 August 2008.
Defty, Andrew (2 December 2013). Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department. Routledge. p. 3. ISBN 978-1317791690.
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 340–342. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. Archived (PDF) from the original on 4 July 2007.
Wheatcroft, S. G. (2000). "The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 52 (6): 1143–1159. doi:10.1080/09668130050143860. PMID 19326595. S2CID 205667754. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 August 2008.
Ignatieff, Michael (23 March 2000). "The Man Who Was Right". New York Review of Books. 47 (5). Retrieved 7 October 2015.
Moyihan, Michael C. (20 August 2011). "How a True Believer Keeps the Faith". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
Hobsbawm, Eric (2011). On History. Hachette UK. p. Chapter 19. ISBN 978-1780220512.
"Robert Conquest an appreciation". nationalreview.com. 5 August 2015. Retrieved 18 September 2015.
Wheatcroft, Stephen (June 2006). "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33: A Reply to Ellman" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 58 (4): 625–633. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 August 2017 – via JSTOR.
Wheatcroft, Stephen G.; Davies, R. W. (2016). The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 441. ISBN 9780230273979.
Priestland, David (May 2011). "The Kirov Murder and Soviet History". History Today. 61 (5). Retrieved 27 September 2015.
The Whisperers, Orlando Figes, Allen Lane 2007, p. 236n
Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-38, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 207.
David Yezzi, Yale Review, Volume 98, Issue 2 (April 2010), p. 183 ff.
"Robert Conquest, Penultimata: Note on Robert Conquest". waywiser-press.com. Archived from the original on 15 January 2014.
Haven, Cynthia (16 August 2010). "Stanford legend Robert Conquest: new books at 93 for the historian and poet". Stanford Report. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
"Robert Conquest". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
Zachary Leader, ed., The Movement Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 2009.
BBC Radio 4 Publicity (29 April 2008). "Mr Larkin's Awkward Day". BBC Radio 4.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Robert Conquest, 'Solzhenitsyn, A Genius with a Blindspot', Sunday Times, 10 August 2008; p. A15
Collected Poems, Robert Conquest
^ Hillier, Bevis (19 November 1986). "Harvest' of Soviet Terrorism Reaped by Historian Conquest". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
O'Sullivan, John (14 August 2015). "What to Make of the Guardian's Shameful Robert Conquest Obituary?". National Review. nationalreview.com. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
Conquest, Robert; Manchip White, Jon (1984). What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide. Stein and Day. p. 7. ISBN 0812829859. Retrieved 24 September 2015.
Conquest, Robert; Manchip White, Jon (1984). What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide. Stein and Day. p. 175. ISBN 0812829859. Retrieved 24 September 2015.
Conquest, Robert; Manchip White, Jon (1984). What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide. Stein and Day. pp. 176–177. ISBN 0812829859. Retrieved 24 September 2015.
^ Hitchens, Christopher (26 November 1999). "Against sinister perfectionism". The Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 25 May 2016.
^ Vogel, Martin (17 December 2018). "Tracking down Conquest's law on organisations". Vogel Wakefield. Archived from the original on 11 October 2021. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
Amis, Kingsley (2012) . Memoirs (E-book ed.). Random House. p. 146. ISBN 9781446414668. Retrieved 13 October 2021 – via Google Books.
Derbyshire, John (25 June 2003). "Conquest's Laws". National Review. Archived from the original on 11 October 2021. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
O'Sullivan, John (27 October 1989). "Conquest's Laws". National Review. Archived from the original on 15 July 2010. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
"Quand Bernard-Henri Lévy pétitionnait contre le régime légal du Nicaragua". 1 October 2009.
McCannon, John (Fall 1998). "Red Empire". The Journal for Multi Media History. Retrieved 23 June 2014.
"Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients". Georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. Retrieved 14 January 2014.
"No. 54255". The London Gazette (Supplement). 29 December 1995. p. 3.
"No. 40366". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 1954. p. 13.
"Ukraine honors Robert Conquest with Presidential Medal of Honor". Ukrweekly.com. 24 September 2006. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 14 January 2014.
"Stanford Report, 21 June 2006". News.stanford.edu. 21 June 2006. Retrieved 14 January 2014.
Jay, Mike. (2013) "Who Were the Dedicatees of Powell’s Works?" The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter.50 (spring): 9-10.
"Streets of world-famous researchers of the Holodomor appeared in Dnipro". Istorychna Pravda (in Ukrainian). 7 February 2024. Retrieved 9 February 2024.
"The Dan David Prize: Laureates 2012:Robert Conquest". dandavidprize.org. Archived from the original on 25 April 2012. Retrieved 6 August 2015.
National Advisory Council. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 20 May 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2011.

External links

Robert Conquest at IMDb
Scourge and Poet, a profile of Robert Conquest
articles by and about Robert Conquest at the New York Review of Books
"Stanford legend Robert Conquest: new books at 93 for the historian and poet," by Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, August 16, 2010
Where Ignorance Isn't Bliss, article by Robert Conquest at National Review Online
His biography at the Hoover Institution
Great Terror at 40
Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with historian Robert Conquest about his new book Reflections on a Ravaged Century at PBS
Robert Conquest profile at Spartacus site
Robert Conquest's profile at Stanford University, Ukrainian Studies Department webpage
Remembering Robert Conquest. The Hoover Institution.
Appearances on C-SPAN
Dunlop, J., & Naimark, N. (2016). "Robert Conquest, 1917–2015". Slavic Review. 75(1), 238–239. doi:10.5612/slavicreview.75.1.238

v t e 1994 Shevchenko National Prize winners
Andriy Antoniuk Olena Apanovich Leonid Bolshakov Yuriy Herts Vasyl Holoborodko Viktor Zaretsky Vasyl Zinkevych Robert Conquest Oles Lupiy Volodymyr Ovsiychuk Roman Rachmanny Nadiya Svitlychna Ivan Svitlychny Ivan Chendei Volodymyr Ivasiuk

v t e List of Antonovych prize winners
1981: Vasyl Barka 1982: Orest Subtelny / Vasyl Stus 1983: Linda Gordon / Emma Andijewska 1984: Magdalena László-Kuțiuk / Yuriy Kolomiyets 1985: David Saunders / Yuiriy Lavrinenko 1986: Bohdan Krawchenko / Natalya Livytska-Cholodna 1987: Robert Conquest / Leonid Plyushch 1988: John-Paul Himka / George Shevelov / Hryhoriy Kostyuk 1989: Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak / Lina Kostenko 1990: Ivan Dziuba / Valeriy Shevchuk 1991: Bohdan Hawrylyshyn / Zbigniew Brzezinski / Ivan Drach 1992: Literaturna Ukrayina / Mykhaylo Braychevskyi / Volodymyr Drozd 1993: Mykola Zhulynskyi / Yaroslav Dashkevych / Mykola Vinhranovskyi 1994: Olena Apanovych / Yevhen Hutsalo 1995: Mykhaylyna Kotsyubynska / Viacheslav Briukhovetsky / Roman Fedoriv 1996: Bohdan Bociurkiw / Hryhoriy Lohvyn / Yuriy Mushketyk 1997: Dmytro Stepovyk / Ihor Kalynets 1998: Yuriy Barabash / George S. N. Luckyj 1999: Ihor Ševčenko 2000: Yuriy Badzyo 2001: Yurii Andrukhovych / Michael Hamm / Roman Szporluk 2002: Yuriy Shapoval / Hryhoriy Huseynov / Yaroslav Isayevych 2003: Mykola Riabchuk / Roman Ivanychuk 2004: Andriy Sodomora / Dmytro Pavlychko 2005: None 2006: Borys Gudziak 2007: Yaroslav Hrytsak 2008: George G. Grabowicz / Andriy Dzhul 2009: Liubomyr Vynar / Oksana Zabuzhko 2010: Aleksandra Hnatiuk / Bogumiła Berdychowska 2011: Andrea Graziosi / Stanislav Kultsytskyi 2012: Zenon Kohut / Frank Sysyn 2013: Leonid Finberg 2014: Timothy Snyder 2015: Serhii Plokhy 2016: Bohdan Prakh 2017: Anne Applebaum 2018: Yuriy Shcherbak 2019: Alexander J. Motyl 2020: Svoboda

List of Antonovych prize winners

1981: Vasyl Barka
1982: Orest Subtelny / Vasyl Stus
1983: Linda Gordon / Emma Andijewska
1984: Magdalena László-Kuțiuk / Yuriy Kolomiyets
1985: David Saunders / Yuiriy Lavrinenko
1986: Bohdan Krawchenko / Natalya Livytska-Cholodna
1987: Robert Conquest / Leonid Plyushch
1988: John-Paul Himka / George Shevelov / Hryhoriy Kostyuk
1989: Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak / Lina Kostenko
1990: Ivan Dziuba / Valeriy Shevchuk
1991: Bohdan Hawrylyshyn / Zbigniew Brzezinski / Ivan Drach
1992: Literaturna Ukrayina / Mykhaylo Braychevskyi / Volodymyr Drozd
1993: Mykola Zhulynskyi / Yaroslav Dashkevych / Mykola Vinhranovskyi
1994: Olena Apanovych / Yevhen Hutsalo
1995: Mykhaylyna Kotsyubynska / Viacheslav Briukhovetsky / Roman Fedoriv
1996: Bohdan Bociurkiw / Hryhoriy Lohvyn / Yuriy Mushketyk
1997: Dmytro Stepovyk / Ihor Kalynets
1998: Yuriy Barabash / George S. N. Luckyj
1999: Ihor Ševčenko
2000: Yuriy Badzyo
2001: Yurii Andrukhovych / Michael Hamm / Roman Szporluk
2002: Yuriy Shapoval / Hryhoriy Huseynov / Yaroslav Isayevych
2003: Mykola Riabchuk / Roman Ivanychuk
2004: Andriy Sodomora / Dmytro Pavlychko
2005: None
2006: Borys Gudziak
2007: Yaroslav Hrytsak
2008: George G. Grabowicz / Andriy Dzhul
2009: Liubomyr Vynar / Oksana Zabuzhko
2010: Aleksandra Hnatiuk / Bogumiła Berdychowska
2011: Andrea Graziosi / Stanislav Kultsytskyi
2012: Zenon Kohut / Frank Sysyn
2013: Leonid Finberg
2014: Timothy Snyder
2015: Serhii Plokhy
2016: Bohdan Prakh
2017: Anne Applebaum
2018: Yuriy Shcherbak
2019: Alexander J. Motyl
2020: Svoboda

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