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47 Reviews a Pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet Studies

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47 Reviews a Pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet Studies reviews 47 A pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet Studies during the Cold War Paul Hollander (ed.) Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008. 272 pages. LENNart SAMUELSON Associate professor of economic history at the Stockholm School of Economics. His current research concerns the “atomic cities” in Russia during the Cold War. His monograph Tankograd (in Swedish, Stockholm 2007) on the formation of Cheliabinsk as a typical “Soviet company town” in the Urals will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London and The head of the Secret Police, Nikolai Ezhov (left) was awarded the Lenin Order in November 1937, at the height of the Great Purges. The by Rosspen, Moscow. nickel mines and the refinery plant in Norilsk, by the Arctic Ocean, were built by Gulag prisoners in the 1940s. The deposits are still among Togehter with Professor the richest in the world (top right). The industrial city Nizhnii Tagil in the Urals had several Gulag camps for new construction projects (bot- Vladimir Khaustov, he tom right). has recently concluded a basic research project: Stalin, NKVD i repres- HE BRITISH HIstORIAN Robert repression available for the first time to a wide, eager cussions of the research: the possible sii, 1936-1938 (Moscow Conquest is without doubt audience. The demand was great in Russia for Western connections between the analyses of 2008), on the role of Sta- among the most well-known accounts and new interpretations of Soviet history, Communism and other ideologies that lin in the launching of the Tand most often quoted special- which had been so falsified by Communist ideology have spurred and legitimated the use of mass terror campaigns ists on Soviet history. His major works and Party censorship. violence. in the late 1930s. The have been translated into dozens of Since the early 1990s, Conquest has been on the The book is divided into two parts. English translation of this languages. Since the 1960s, Conquest editorial board of several major research projects on The first part, ”Soviet Communism”, book will be published has written influential books on Stalin’s Soviet history and an eager participant in the scholarly contains articles by Joshua Rubinstein, by Yale University Press terror against the party cadres and periodicals dealing with the changing research condi- Norman Naimark, Stephen Cohen, in 2010. other groups in Soviet society in the tions in contemporary Russian history. Conquest is Mark Kramer, John B. Dunlop, and Lee late 1930s. Another book addressed the still an active scholar at the Hoover Institution for War, Edwards. In the second part, “Com- notorious Kolyma labor camps for gold Peace and Revolution, and is writing an autobiogra- parative Perspectives”, we find articles production in the Soviet Far East. His phy, and a book of poems. on Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Latin monograph and documentary film on For his 90th birthday, colleagues contributed arti- America, postcolonial Africa, and the the 1932–33 famine in the Soviet Union cles to a Festschrift devoted to “The Poet, Writer, and use of research results from Soviet stud- had a deep impact in the 1980s on the Historian — A Man of Durable Accomplishments”. ies in explaining political Islamism. In public and politicians in Canada and the These essays honoring Conquest all concern themes each of these articles, there are explicit United States.1 that have been central to his research fields, includ- references to Conquest’s books. Several of his earlier works acquired ing state terror, ideological control of sciences, public a new and perhaps even more impor- opinion, and the wider issue of the responsibility of THE FEstscHRIft CONCLUDES with a tant role in Russia in the late 1980s. intellectuals in the modern world. In his introduction, biography and a short list of Conquest’s Under glasnost, Soviet publishing Paul Hollander emphasizes, using concrete examples, many publications, mainly mono- houses and television stations made the themes where Robert Conquest’s scholarship graphs, that have come out since the his Stalin biographies and books on the was truly path-breaking. He also discusses the reper- late 1950s. There are likely not many 48reviews Continued. A pathbreaker Soviet specialists who are familiar with was linked both to the Foreign Office and to British discussed not so much what was actu- Conquest’s poetry and translations embassies in order to provide exclusive information ally known or thought probable about from Russian of poets such as Boris on events in the USSR and Eastern Europe. These the existing camp system in the Soviet Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. facts were analyzed by IRD personnel and sometimes Union. What was essential was to pur- Conquest has also written political distributed within the ministry and the diplomatic vey information to important groups in pamphlets such as the following: Where corps of the United Kingdom. The IRD also prepared Western Europe about a matter “where Do Marxists Go from Here? information materials for the BBC radio the Soviets have no good answer”. (1958), Where Marx Went programs that were broadcasted within Jointly with their American colleagues, Wrong (1970), and What to England, as well as to Eastern Europe and who were also engaged in political and Do When the Russians Come: the Soviet Union, in these countries’ na- psychological warfare, the IRD decided A Survivor’s Guide (1984). tive languages. to publish pamphlets and prepare news Here, I shall discuss Research on the IRD is hampered by articles and bulletins on the forced la- some matters that relate to the fact that its archives at the Public bor camps. It had been decided that no the fields of Soviet research Records Office (PRO) in Kew have a de- more than one or two names of Soviet that are presented in the classification limit of at least 50 years. camps should be hammered into the section “Soviet Commu- In other words, only the main outlines mind of the public, until these names nism”. First, how did Rob- of IRD activities until the early 1950s are were as clearly linked with Communist ert Conquest make his own, known from available documents, and terror as the names “Auschwitz” and particular career in the So- Robert Conquest. the rest of our knowledge about the IRD “Treblinka” were linked with Nazism. vietological establishment? must be inferred from interviews with The Soviet camps chosen for the pur- Second, what can we learn about the former collaborators. pose was Karaganda and Vorkuta. overall conditions of research into the Conquest wrote, for example, a memorandum on Later, Kolyma in the Soviet Far East was Soviet period in Russia’s history during the show trials in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslova- added. the Cold War in the West? Third, which kia, addressing the intriguing question of what it was In this exclusive ”think tank”, Robert of Conquest’s contributions to Soviet that made the defendants confess to all the accusa- Conquest did not simply receive his history are of lasting value, and which tions. His articles were circulated within the Foreign training as a major specialist in Soviet can be characterized as obsolete and Office and commented upon within the East European affairs. In frank interviews, he would out-dated in the new century? and Soviet Russian departments of the ministry. Of later admit that many other topics he Robert Conquest was born in 1917. course, this question was also hotly debated in the wrote on in the 1960s and 1970s had ac- In the 1930s, he studied at the univer- open press in Western Europe at the time. Not until tually been fairly thoroughly prepared sities in Grenoble and Oxford. As a the first survivors of the Slansky affair in Czechoslova- earlier, during the IRD period. How- member of the Communist Party group kia were allowed to publish their memoirs in 1968 was ever, there is one point that we should at Oxford, he traveled to the Soviet it possible to get confirmation on some of the guess- emphasize, one that is important in as- Union in the summer of 1937. He visited work that had been done earlier on the nature of the sessing the lasting contributions made Leningrad, Moscow, and Odessa. At Stalinist interrogation methods and show trials. by Conquest and other forerunners in that time, he did not understand what modern Soviet history. In contrast to was going on behind the façade of the AN EVEN LEss WELL-KNOWN side of the IRD, and of academic think tanks, the IRD was also propaganda machine. However, a few Conquest’s career, concerns the preparation of infor- engaged in manipulating public opin- years later, he left the Communist Party. mational material for the press and other mass media ion. Having learned the lessons of psy- As an officer in the British army in the in the West. In the early 1950s, Gunnar Heckscher, chological warfare in the fight against immediate postwar period, Conquest professor of political science at Uppsala University and Nazi propaganda, the British seldom saw the Sovietization process in Eastern later leader of the Swedish Conservative Party, visited distorted the facts or lied outright. How- Europe, and this experience made him the IRD on behalf of the Swedish Parliament, which ever, in the Cold War period it was de- decidedly anti-communist.2 Conquest had decided to set up a similar agency for civil defense cided to support the most somber “class never visited the Soviet Union between and psychological warfare. Heckscher’s visit was analysis” of Soviet society possible. In 1937 and its final year of existence, official yet very secretive, and little is known about this version, the terror machine — which 1990, when the Communist regime was additional connections that might exist between the no serious observer denied existed — collapsing.
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