Robert Conquest: o maior sovietologo americano (1917-2015)

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Enviada em: quinta-feira, 6 de agosto de 2015 14:17
 

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Assunto: [wais] History -> Robert Conquest, 1917-2015 (Anthony D'Agostino, USA)

Anthony D'Agostino writes:



Sad to hear about the August 3rd passing of historian Robert Conquest, who wrote penetrating works on the politics of the Stalin era and championed Kremlinology. I worked closely with Conquest while at the Hoover institution in 1986-7, on a State Department grant to finish my Soviet Succession Struggles (1987). I thought Conquest the most knowledgeable of the Soviet historians of the time and hoped to get my views past him before publication. We talked almost daily about the lurid details of the purge era, who was shot, when, what faction benefited, how it affected foreign policy. All this according to an array of sources, official accounts, memoirs, protocol evidence, but not archival materials, which would not be open for several more years.

Conquest called Kremlinology "Soviet Namierism," for Louis Namier, the British historian who wrote the elegant study of the eighteenth-century British aristocracy. When he saw my MS, he said, "Well, that is the whole thing, isn't it"? We agreed on many things, but not on Margaret Thatcher. I did think he was right about the "revisionism" of the period in the works of J. Arch Getty and Robert Thurston. They suggested, in detailed and serious studies, that Stalin had not been the real power behind the purge, but that it had been a rather complex and spontaneous affair in which a lot of local scores had been settled at the expense of the apparatus victims. Even granting some of this, I still agreed with Conquest's more conventional version, with Stalin the puppeteer.

Lacking the archival evidence, no one had the clincher. But even with archival material available to the degree that it is today, I don't think many historians would say that Stalin was not the prime mover. The revisionists have gone on to establish, according to archival evidence, that the numbers of the executed was not, as Conquest had argued, in the millions, but in the hundreds of thousands. This is the question that everyone fixes on, and there they have had a small victory.

Conquest is, I think, still worth reading, especially his early work on the Khrushchev period.

JE comments:  Robert Conquest was a WAISer from the early days, although he never posted to the Forum during my editorship.  I did not have the pleasure of meeting him, although Prof. Hilton often spoke of him and his work.  

See, for example, this Christmas 1999 posting from RH:

http://waisworld.org/go.jsp?id=02a&objectType=post&o=64582&objectTypeId=58832&topicId=123

Robert was also an accomplished poet, especially known for his biting limericks.  Who can forget "There once was a Bolshie called Lenin"?  (Thanks here to Nigel Jones.)

http://waisworld.org/go.jsp?id=02a&objectType=post&o=56865&objectTypeId=51115&topicId=51

RIP, Robert Conquest, one of the greatest Kremlinologists ever.

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 Robert Conquest, 1917-2015 (Anthony D`Agostino, USA)



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 History and Journalism (Ronald Hilton, USA, 12/25/99 2:14 pm)

Two WAIS Fellows, Robert Conquest and Brian Crozier, have been in the news recently, the first because of the appearance of his &IReflections on a Ravaged Century, the second of his Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, which parallels Conquest's books on the "great Soviet terror." Despite their common, supplementary interests and their age (Conquest was born in 1917, Crozier in 1918), their careers have been different.  
     Conquest was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, after I was a Senior-Demy there. In those days, Oxford was very demanding academically but, devoted primarily to the humanities, it was lost in the clouds. In the hierarchy of subjects, classics ("Greats") was at the top of the pole. Modeled after it, my own major, Modern European Languages (which meant much more than languages) was less prestigious. Very France-centered, it tolerated Spanish, but ignored Portuguese and all things Latin American.  
     The present political world was academically not regarded as fitting for academic study, since it is too close to us for objective study. In view of the ignorant nonsense which emanates from some academic departments today, that attitude was understandable, but this is the world we have to live in. Journalists were scorned. Students going to fight in the Spanish Civil War boasted that they never read a newspaper. The Oxford Union provided a platform for political speakers, and some of the students were declared Communists. They really were all wet, admittedly from the rain of the great depression. The serious study of the contemporary political world was emerging in a new major called PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). The older generation viewed it with much suspicion or disdain. That Conquest chose this as his major was evidence that his interest was in that direction. After military service, he got to know the reality of international political life in the foreign service from 1946 to 1956. His mindset was decided by the four years he spent in the British mission in Bulgaria. His warnings about the reality of communism put him at odds with many academics and literary people, but now they are recognized as definitive, just as Burnett Bolloten's analysis of the Spanish Civil War, at first angrily dismissed by the "politically correct", is now viewed as unassailable.  
     Crozier´s background is quite different. Australian by birth, he traveled the world as a journalist and is reputed to have interviewed more heads of state than any other. He has been associated with The Economist, which is one of the few news magazines with a serious interest in international affairs. Thank heavens that our American edition is now printed in Merced, California. Serious public interest in foreign affairs in this country has diminished and weeklies are emphasizing "news you can use." Crozier did not have to escape from the academic and literary world in which Conquest grew up.  
     The international community of journalists devoted to world affairs performs an invaluable role, as we have so often stressed. They are courageous, bright people more likely to understand situations than diplomats and academics, protected as they are in their cocoons. There was no school or department of journalism at Oxford when I was there, and, if there is one today, I have never heard of it. American universities lead he way in raising journalism to a professional level. At Stanford, we are lucky to have the Knight Fellowships which bring young newspeople from around the world to spend a year with us. We learn from them, and we trust that they learn from their Stanford experience.