RIP Robert Conquest

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
—That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
The grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

The great Soviet historian, Robert Conquest, just passed away. His obituary in WSJ is here. I was an avid reader of his histories of Stalin, The Great Terror (dealing with the Stalinist show trials and purges in the 1930's) and Harvest of Sorrow (dealing with the dekulakization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and its disastrous results).

These books may have overestimated (perhaps grossly so) the number of people "done in" by Stalin, but when Conquest first published The Great Terror in 1968, his was almost the only voice of his era decrying the utter villainy of Stalin's regime. In those years, the Soviet Union was viewed by idealistic Progressives (actually, dupes and useful idiots) through rose-colored glasses as a kind of utopia to which Americans should aspire.

Conquest's histories, though perhaps now superseded by later works incorporating information from Soviet archives (unavailable to Conquest when he first wrote and themselves of uncertain accuracy), supplied some of the first realistic portrayals of the horrors of Stalinist Russia.