The man who told us so

THE intellectual history of the West in the 20th century was dominated by arguments over totalitarianism: its causes, effects—and possible justification. Even after flag-waving supporters of the Soviet Union had dwindled to irrelevance, the conviction that communism was a good idea poorly executed persisted in certain quarters. Others still thought the communist threat overstated, or drew equivalences between crimes committed in the name of socialism and those of Western anti-communism. The position that communism was a monstrously evil system responsible for unprecedented atrocities was held by only a minority of scholars. Robert Conquest, who died on August 3rd, was one of the most eloquent and implacable members of that camp. To the chagrin of his opponents, he turned out to be right.

He did not start out as a scourge of the left. He emerged from a brainy ancient British school as an ardent socialist and a crack shot, and fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war (albeit for one day, firing a single round). While at Oxford he joined the Communist Party. But he soon left, disgusted by a party hack who claimed that Britain’s bourgeois leaders could never declare war on Hitler.

Mindslaughter

Witnessing the lies and terror of the Soviet takeover in Bulgaria in 1947 showed him what Stalinism was like in practice. He helped his lover, the beautiful Tatiana Mihailova, escape the clutches of the secret police, blighting his diplomatic career. She became his second wife; his fourth and last marriage, to Elizabeth Neece Wingate, was the longest and happiest of his 98-year life.

For all his brains and later academic renown, he was no swot: he started cramming five days before finals, from an undemanding textbook nicknamed “Economics for the Half-witted Child”. He was an accidental historian, too. He worked, like George Orwell, in a branch of the Foreign Office (now long-closed, sadly) which analysed the Kremlin’s power and practice, sharing the results confidentially with journalists. Those papers turned into books—initially more solid than sizzling. When he later moved to an American university, it was not for prestige, but because he needed the money to support two families. He had won a PEN prize for the best long poem written during the second world war, but was not allowed to teach English literature because he lacked a degree in the subject.

His poems were by turns amusing, bawdy, lyrical, profound and satirical. He parodied others, and himself. But his greatest work was chronicling chapters of the Soviet nightmare, which had been cloaked first in secrecy and then in shame. First-hand accounts existed of the man-made famine in Ukraine, the great terror of the late 1930s, and the destruction of nations in the maw of Stalinism. What he did was to turn these fragments of available information into comprehensive histories.

He wrote more calmly about totalitarianism than about the accomplices and the deniers of its crimes. Stalin was a thug, Lenin a maniac. But why did so many sophisticated, educated Westerners ignore or excuse what was happening? He harried and skewered fellow-travellers and wishful thinkers, reserving particular scorn for apologist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan admired him. Critics called him a rabid anti-communist. He enjoyed teasing them, coining “Conquest’s Laws”—the first being that, generally speaking, everyone is “reactionary” on things he knows about.

When the Soviet archives opened, his meticulous work was utterly vindicated. His books were published in Russia, and he brought out updated editions in English. Mulling a new title for “The Great Terror”, his pal Kingsley Amis suggested “I told you so, you fucking fools”. He preferred derision to self-righteousness, summarising Soviet Communism in a much-quoted limerick:

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

The kind of people who overlooked such trifles, he reckoned, were also willing to scrub their minds on other issues. He despised much modern literary criticism: it used “important” freely but shunned “beautiful”. For him, the great pursuit was the “deep blue clarities of a delighting mind”. He wrote: “Just as it is people who think they have discovered the laws of history who have, in our time, inflicted our major public catastrophes so—in a lesser field, or at least one in which the results are not so literally bloody—it is those who think they have discovered the laws of literature who have been the destroyers.”

Academic pettifogging, conventionality and gullibility were favourite targets. He longed for “The Oxford Book of Untrendy Verse”, and published a bogus critical analysis of Christian imagery in Amis’s “Lucky Jim”, delighting in the fuss when literary types wrote solemn responses. Other pranks were nastier. He faked an official letter to his friend Philip Larkin (who had a rather greater interest than he did in erotica) warning him of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act (Larkin hired a lawyer; a contrite Conquest paid the bill). In the days when gay men met in public toilets, Conquest (to amuse Amis) bellowed “All right, Sergeant, get your notebook at the ready,” sending the hapless denizens scurrying. But the cruel streak was atypical. Having seen where grand designs led, he cherished scepticism and moderation. A late poem, “Sooner or Later”, ends:

What’s helpful? Not much. Nothing?
But to fill in the time
There’s little harm in clothing
Such nude truths with a rhyme.