Historical Conquest

...One of the reasons we take Nazism so much more seriously than communism is that we assume Nazi ideology leads directly to the depravities we associate with it, while Communist barbarism is a matter of "excesses," of mis- or over-application of Marxist doctrine...

...and second, against those with a vested interest in undermining the whole idea of finding out the truth about Soviet communism...

...But one believes it with all the fervent credulity of a fellow traveler...

...Common sense fails because it is parochial...

...Socialism is not a synonym for humanitarianism," Conquest says, though millions of otherwise decent people long thought it was...

...It was that he thought he could understand Hitler by taking the worst fellow he had ever met on the Birmingham City Council and extrapolating from there...

...The end of hostilities in 1945 put the Soviet Union into a dire crisis...

...He likened Russia to an atavistic despotism, rather than a progressive idyll...

...But, by giving us a window into his mind, it shows how Conquest Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...But Conquest understands, in a way that Orwell did not, that common sense is not a perfect solution, either...

...The Sovi-etophile biographer and historian Isaac Deutscher and the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm emerge as the true goats of the narrative (much as George Orwell and the English historian of Russia, Leonard Schapiro, stand as its heroes...

...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Robert Conquest is the great historian of Stalinism, with a fair claim to be the great historian of twentieth-century Russia...

...That sentiment summarizes fairly neatly Conquest's stance on contemporary politics...

...was able to draw wholly accurate conclusions about Russia where thousands of others—with similar backgrounds, similar education, and similar access to data—were led astray...

...It was Deutscher who peddled the transparently non-factual line that the West "started" the Cold War, since "it was only after the Communists had been ejected from the French and Italian governments that Stalin began to eject the anti-Communists from the Eastern European governments...

...Conquest clearly has Hobsbawm in mind when he snickers at historians' "remarkable scraping of the barrel" for proletarian uprisings in nineteenth-century Britain...

...Conquest was immune to it, possibly because he had been educated in the histories of the Greeks and Romans, not the utopias of modern political visionaries...

...But he clearly tends to the idea that the violence of Stalinism was inherent to the ideology...

...The search for, and exaltation of, armed clashes seems no more than a weak version of that patriotic romanticism about battles so much sneered at by people perfectly happy with this left-wing equivalent...

...It was simple enough to satisfy half-wits but complex enough to require an interpreter caste...

...Such wishes were incompatible with Stalinism— and could be thwarted only if the USSR were kept on a war footing...

...First is the matter, much discussed in intellectual circles for the last decade, of whether and how Hitler's crimes can be compared to Stalin's...

...Wells, after visiting Stalin, said he had "never met a man more candid, fair, and honest...

...To a degree unusual even for the historian of a contentious period, Conquest faced a double combat: first, against his unusually tricky subject matter, muddied by scanty information and willful propaganda...

...Conquest's latest book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, may not be the best introduction to Conquest the historian—the indefatigable packrat of data, the judicious sifter-out of propaganda, the masterful narrator with a pitch-perfect sense of historical drama...

...I answered yes I did," Conquest recalls, "but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with 'I feel so.'" Nonetheless, he adds, "Whatever view one takes, without feeling the Holocaust one cannot feel, or understand, Stalinism...

...To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment," Conquest says, "or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault...

...For Orwell, the obvious antidote to ideologies was the blockheaded common sense of the intellectually un-chic working classes...

...Conquest supposedly replied, "Well, perhaps I Told You So, You F—ing Fools...

...His understanding of ideology is humanistic and subtle, and it takes him to two important questions...

...Millions of soldiers had seen the West—or even Poland and the Balkans, which were vastly more prosperous...

...First was Communist propaganda...

...With their reverence for "activism," their worship of the false god of "education," and particularly their "notion of an enemy class, or sex, or race, determined to oppose all change," the modern politically correct classes are practicing a Manichean politics that bears watching—since causes are always an excuse for people to behave badly without guilt...

...The "soft" propaganda churned out by fellow travelers in academia and journalism was another obstacle—and arguably more pernicious...

...Same with The Harvest of Sorrow, his 1986 account of the government-engineered famine that killed upwards of five million Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33...

...Conquest's constant preoccupation is to avoid what Orwell called the "lure of the profound," for he finds Big Ideas and Big Ideologies pernicious "mind traps...

...Naturally, they sought social relaxation, regional autonomy, and private property once peacetime came...

...At a basic level, Conquest writes, "people could not bring themselves to believe the horrors of Stalinism"—or Hitlerism, for that matter...

...To say that Conquest is an enemy of ideology does not mean that he is out of his depth or impatient when discussing it...

...Conquest's friend Kingsley Amis once wrote that when an American publisher wanted to reissue The Great Terror in the late 1980s, he asked Conquest if he would mind giving the book a new title...

...Neville Chamberlain's great flaw, in this view, was not that he was unprincipled or cowardly...

...Revolutionary despotisms must institute terror, since "it is obvious enough that any radical dictatorship with a program involving the destruction of whole classes or races is bound to rely on a larger degree of terror than a 'reactionary' regime needs...

...How's that...

...Conquest sees a "family resemblance" between modern statist attitudes and old totalitarian ones—particularly in the American academy and among the more utopian architects of the European Union...

...British diplomat Sir Bernard Pares believed that Stalin's show trials were real trials, on the grounds that "the bulky verbatim reports were in any case impressive...

...But Conquest also sees that such terror has a tendency to become omnivorous, because Communists must soon institute purges against their own, as well...

...Marxism was a protean doctrine, with all the advantages of both its simplicity and its complexity...

...It is not as if, with the Cold War finally over, we have escaped the dangers of Marxist habits of thought...

...A French interviewer for Le Monde once asked Conquest whether he thought the Holocaust "worse" than Stalin's crimes...

...Conquest is circumspect on the subject, understanding that such comparisons can be flippant and crass...

...But it is Hobsbawm, with his continuing insistence that the building of Stalinist concentration camps was justified by the hopes of a radiant future, whom Conquest finds most repellent...

...Sidney and Beatrice Webb noted that Lenin had predicted in 1922 that treachery could undermine the revolu-tion—"a forecast," they later wrote, "which was borne out by the evidence in the Moscow Trials of 1937...

...Nor was anyone inclined to listen to Conquest in the early 1960s, when, well before the more celebrated jeremiads of André Amalrik, he became the first to speak of a "present general crisis of the Soviet system...

...In a less bloody way, it was the same logic in Soviet ideology that caused the Cold War...

...And he was skeptical of modern historians' reliance on official documents—even slanted ones—as the last arbiter in any dispute...

...And yet from Brezhnev's era through Gorbachev's, his books seemed to go out of print as fast as he could write them...

...Non-Marxists were just as credulous...

...Conquest believes Duranty was blackmailed over sex...

...But over a longer period some similar confrontation must have developed...

...The story doesn't exactly ring true...

...Conquest notes: "The Cold War, as it actually turned out, was not inevitable...

...That brings him to the second question, of whether Stalin's mass murder was inevitable...

...Two kinds of obscurantism permitted communism not just to survive but to enjoy a certain prestige well into the 1980s...

...Conquest does not reject this distinction out of hand...

...The New York Times's Walter Duranty denied in print evidence of the Ukrainian famine that he had seen with his own eyes...

...To read some writers, one would think that the nineteenth century consisted largely of the Peter-loo Massacre, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Bloody Sunday," Conquest writes...

...When The Great Terror was published in 1968, its meticulously documented account of Stalin's purges and show trials was dismissed or ignored by liberal academics and Sovietologists...