Robert Conquest, great historian of the Soviet era, has died

[Larry1]

I was sad to see that the historian Robert Conquest died this week. I read his books "The Great Terror" and "The Kirov Affair" many years ago and enjoyed them very much. I've been meaning to read "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" and "Harvest of Sorrow", about the terror-famine.

For those who aren't students of Russian history Sergei Kirov was Communist Party boss in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and a member of the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo. He was very popular, evidently even more popular than Stalin at the 16th Party Congress in 1934. On December 1, 1934 he was assassinated, under curious circumstances. Stalin used the pretext of his assassination to begin his massive purge. There was some circumstantial evidence that Stalin himself may have ordered the assassination. But during the purge the top two NKVD (secret police) men in St. Petersburg were executed. One or both of these men might well have been the ones who arranged the assassination, on Stalin's orders, but we'll never know for sure. Conquest's book examines the circumstances and available evidence.

Here are some excerpts from Conquest's obituary in Britain's "The Guardian":

Historian and poet who exposed the full extent of Stalin’s terror during the Soviet era

He was not the first to describe the extent and workings of the Stalin tyranny, but he did so in fine detail. He had become, for a broad Russian readership, the man who told the truth about the terror, and Stalin’s murderous tyranny.

The Great Terror (1968) undermined the “official” Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, as the key to the mechanism of terror. He returned to this in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), though no smoking-gun evidence has yet been found to confirm Stalin’s role.

Conquest demonstrated that the show trials of old Bolsheviks were the product of faked evidence, torture, blackmail, threats and deceit. He explained in carefully documented detail the mechanism of the arrests, interrogations – the “conveyor” of continuous interrogation, denial of food and sleep, and extreme physical abuse – and the mechanics of the trials.

He was less persuasive explaining why the terror was created, falling back on Stalin’s motivation, his unquenched drive for absolute power. Critics have continued to challenge Conquest’s view, elaborated in Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991), that in the last analysis the purge depended upon the personal and political drives of Stalin alone. The Great Terror, with revised editions in 1990 and 2007, remains Conquest’s major work, in measure endorsed by the flood of revelations that followed the opening of the Soviet archives in the 90s.

Further studies deepened his account of the terror. Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) and his history of the collectivisation of agriculture, The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), were forensically argued investigations of aspects of Soviet life that had been denied or ignored by myopic western commentators.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest

Those who want to rehabilitate Stalin's reputation hate Conquest's books.

[mendeleyev]

Thank you for posting about this, Larry.

We have lost an important voice who chronicled history very faithfully.