Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest (Malvern, 1917 – Palo Alto, 2015) was a British historian, poet and novelist who later became an American citizen. During the Cold War he was one of the West's leading Sovietologists, and his work on Stalin's purges still provokes argument among specialists.

Born in Worcestershire to an American father who had served with an ambulance unit attached to the French army in the First World War, and an English mother, he was educated at Winchester and at Oxford. After a gap year in Grenoble and Bulgaria, he returned to Oxford in 1937 and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but he broke with it when the party denounced the war. He was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and later posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer.

After the war he joined the Foreign Office and worked as press officer in Sofia, where he watched the communist takeover at close range. In 1948 he moved to the Information Research Department, a government unit set up to counter communist propaganda. He left the diplomatic service in 1956 to write full time, and from 1981 he was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

His best-known book, The Great Terror (1968), offered an early comprehensive account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. It drew on émigré testimony, Soviet official documents and material published during the Khrushchev Thaw, and it looked beyond the Moscow show trials. Conquest argued that the terror grew out of the Leninist system and that the death toll was very high; other historians later challenged his figures, some of which they considered too large. He later wrote The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) on the Ukrainian famine and attacked Western intellectuals who had downplayed it.

He was also a poet and novelist and a figure in The Movement, the British literary group that included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. His legacy lies mainly in the debate over twentieth-century communism: his books shaped Soviet historiography and Cold War anticommunist thought, although many of his conclusions have been revised since the Soviet archives opened after 1991.