Historical Conquest

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; and second, against those with a vested interest in undermining the whole idea of finding out the truth about Soviet communism. 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. But, by giving us a window into his mind, it shows how Conquest 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.

Two kinds of obscurantism permitted communism not just to survive but to enjoy a certain prestige well into the 1980s. First was Communist propaganda. 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. He likened Russia to an atavistic despotism, rather than a progressive idyll. And he was skeptical of modern historians’ reliance on official documents — even slanted ones — as the last arbiter in any dispute.

The “soft” propaganda churned out by fellow travelers in academia and journalism was another obstacle — and arguably more pernicious. Marxism was a protean doctrine, with all the advantages of both its simplicity and its complexity. It was simple enough to satisfy half-wits but complex enough to require an interpreter caste. The Sovietophile 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). 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.”

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. Conquest clearly has Hobsbawm in mind when he snickers at historians’ “remarkable scraping of the barrel” for proletarian uprisings in nineteenth-century Britain. “To read some writers, one would think that the nineteenth century consisted largely of the Peterloo Massacre, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Bloody Sunday,” Conquest writes. “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.”

Non-Marxists were just as credulous. H. G. Wells, after visiting Stalin, said he had “never met a man more candid, fair, and honest.” The New York Times’s Walter Duranty denied in print evidence of the Ukrainian famine that he had seen with his own eyes. (Conquest believes Duranty was blackmailed over sex.) Sidney and Beatrice Webb noted that Lenin had predicted in 1922 that treachery could undermine the revolution — “a forecast,” they later wrote, “which was borne out by the evidence in the Moscow Trials of 1937.” 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.”

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.” “Socialism is not a synonym for humanitarianism,” Conquest says, though millions of otherwise decent people long thought it was. For Orwell, the obvious antidote to ideologies was the blockheaded common sense of the intellectually un-chic working classes. But Conquest understands, in a way that Orwell did not, that common sense is not a perfect solution, either. Common sense fails because it is parochial.

At a basic level, Conquest writes, “people could not bring themselves to believe the horrors of Stalinism” — or Hitlerism, for that matter. Neville Chamberlain’s great flaw, in this view, was not that he was unprincipled or cowardly. 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.

To say that Conquest is an enemy of ideology does not mean that he is out of his depth or impatient when discussing it. His understanding of ideology is humanistic and subtle, and it takes him to two important questions. 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. Conquest is circumspect on the subject, understanding that such comparisons can be flippant and crass. A French interviewer for Le Monde once asked Conquest whether he thought the Holocaust “worse” than Stalin’s crimes. “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.”

That brings him to the second question, of whether Stalin’s mass murder was inevitable. 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. Conquest does not reject this distinction out of hand. But he clearly tends to the idea that the violence of Stalinism was inherent to the ideology. 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.” But Conquest also sees that such terror has a tendency to become omnivorous, because Communists must soon institute purges against their own, as well.

In a less bloody way, it was the same logic in Soviet ideology that caused the Cold War. The end of hostilities in 1945 put the Soviet Union into a dire crisis. Millions of soldiers had seen the West — or even Poland and the Balkans, which were vastly more prosperous. Naturally, they sought social relaxation, regional autonomy, and private property once peacetime came. Such wishes were incompatible with Stalinism — and could be thwarted only if the USSR were kept on a war footing. Conquest notes: “The Cold War, as it actually turned out, was not inevitable. But over a longer period some similar confrontation must have developed.”

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

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. “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.” That sentiment summarizes fairly neatly Conquest’s stance on contemporary politics.

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. Conquest supposedly replied, “Well, perhaps I Told You So, You F — ing Fools. How’s that?” The story doesn’t exactly ring true. But one believes it with all the fervent credulity of a fellow traveler.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.