Notes 4Introduction 1. Czeslaw Milosz, “The Poet Who Was Right,” National Review, August 17, 1992. 2. Robert Conquest, Tyrants and Typewriters (Lexington, MA: 1989), pp. xi, xiii. 3. See Harvey Klehr, “Honoring Evil,” New York Post, March 22, 2007. 4. As of 1984 John Kenneth Galbraith believed that the Soviet system was stable and effi cient and took good care of its citizens. He observed, among other things, that the Soviet economy made “great material progress in recent years . one sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the street.” Quoted in Freedom Review, July–August, 1992, p. 6. 5. First published in New York in 1981 and most recently in 1997 in New Brunswick, NJ, and still in print. 6. Conquest, Tyrants and Typewriters, p. 8. The quote comes from an essay fi rst published in 1966. 7. Jay Nordlinger, “Conquests’s Conquest,” National Review, December 9, 2002. The portrait of Conquest—cheerful, jocular, even a practical joker—that emerges from the recollections of his friend, Kingsley Amis, further highlights this apparent incongruity between personality and professional preoccupations. Memoirs, London, 1991. 8. George Walden, “History on His Side,” Daily Telegraph, June 11, 2005. 9. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York, 1986), pp. 344, 6. 10. Ibid., pp. 328, 329. 11. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London, 1991), p. 132. 12. An extended discussion of these disparities, and their proposed explanation may be found in the introduction of Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields (Wilmington, DE: 2006). 13. Stephen Pinker, “A History of Violence,” New Republic, March 19, 2007, p. 19. Pinker notes among the favorable developments the decline or disappearance of cruelty as entertainment, of human sacrifi ce, of slavery, and of public “torture and mutilation as routine punishment.” He also notes a similar decline of the death penalty for trivial offenses, of “homicide as the major form of confl ict resolution,” and of the diminished proportion (in relation to population size) of those killed in various confl icts. 14. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: 2007), pp. 36–37. 15. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: 2003), pp. 100–01, 108–09. 16. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: 2006), pp. 123. 17. Ibid., p. 127. For an illuminating discussion of some of the psychological aspects of this violence see Anne Thurston, “Urban Violence During the Cultural Revolution,” in Violence in China, ed., Jonathan Lipman and Stevan Harrell (New York: 1990). 18. “The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew them personally. Everyone knew everyone in a village.” Jean Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes—The Rwandan Genocide: The Killers Speak (New York: 2005), p. 60. 19. Ibid., p. 115. 206 Notes 20. “A messenger from the municipal judge went house to house summoning us to a meet- ing right away. There the judge announced that the reason for the meeting was the killing of every Tutsi without exception. It was simply said and it was simple to understand.” [Ibid., p. 9., my emphasis] 21. Ibid., p. 210. 22. Ibid., pp. 42, 124, 50, 97. 23. Ibid., pp. 123, 44, 43. 24. Ibid., pp. 46, 11, 13. 25. Ibid., p. 213. Group solidarity and dynamics also played a part in Islamic terrorism as was noted in an article describing the motives of Moroccan youth: “the turn to violence is seldom made alone. Terrorists don’t simply die for a cause . ‘They die for each other.’” Andrea Elliott, “Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis,” New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2007, p. 72. 26. Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, pp. 23, 31, 76. 27. Ibid., pp. 56, 58. 28. Ibid., pp. 80, 59, 121. 29. Ibid., pp. 121–22. 30. Ibid., pp. 124, 124–25. 31. Ibid., p. 57. 32. A recent book argued that “evil cannot be satisfactorily explained—and . perhaps it should not be explained since explanation is a slippery slope that tends towards acceptance.” Lance Morrow, Evil: An Investigation (New York: 2003), p. 55. 33. George Konrad, A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (New York: 2007), pp. 292–93. 34. Gloria Cigman, Exploring Evil Through the Landscape of Literature (Berne, Switzerland: 2002), p. 17. 35. John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: 1990), pp. 5, 7, 233, 232. 36. John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Ithaca, NY: 2005), pp. xi, xii, 1, 2. 37. John Kenny Crane, The Root of All Evil: The Thematic Unity of William Styron’s Fiction (Columbia, SC: 1984), p. 25. 38. Quoted in Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: 1995), pp. 196–99. 39. Ibid., p. 206. 40. David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton University Press: 2006). Cited in the New York Times, July 24, 2006, p. B3. 41. Delbanco, The Death of Satan, pp. 16–17, 224. 42. Leszek Kolakowski, My Correct Views on Everything (South Bend, IN: 2005), p. 180. 43. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, IL: 1953), pp. 208, 106, 348, 352. 44. Ibid. p. 105. 45. Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, CT: 1993), pp. 7, 11, 17, 29, 38, 39, 56–57. 46. Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (New York: 2000), p. 1. 47. Nazila Fathi, “Iran Exonerates Six Who Killed In Islam’s Name,” New York Times, April 19, 2007. 48. Todd Gitlin, “The Wound That Refuses to Heal,” New York Times Book Review, September 23, 2001, p. 6. A review of In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf. 49. Maalouf, In the Name of Identity, p. 93. 50. Ibid., p. 31. 51. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 27, 37–38. 52. Gao Xingjian, The Case for Literature (New Haven, CT: 2007), p. 50. 53. For further discussion see Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality (Chicago: 2006). Notes 207 54. See Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge MA: 2001), pp. 149–51, 154–55. 55. I discussed at some length the numerous, and sometimes confl icting, conceptions and defi nitions of intellectuals in Chapter 2 (“Intellectuals, Politics and Morality”) of Political Pilgrims. Chapter 1 1. Cited in Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928–1978 (New York, 1981), p. 11. 2. For a transcript of the trial and appeals that circulated on their behalf, see Max Hayward, ed. and trans., On Trial: The Soviet State Versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak” (New York, 1967). 3. Cited in Peter Reddaway, ed. and trans., Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union (New York, 1972), p. 61. 4. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1968), p. 415. 5. Owen Lattimore, “New Road to Asia,” National Geographic, December 1944, p. 657. 6. David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Connecticut, 1947), pp. ix–x. 7. Robert Conquest, Refl ections on a Ravaged Century (New York, 2000), p. 137. 8. See my essay “Premature Witness,” about Gustav Herling and his memoir A World Apart in the literary journal AGNI 54, published at Boston University in 2001. This special issue was dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of Amnesty International. 9. Cited in Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 230. 10. Ibid., p. 226. 11. Ibid., p. 282 12. Ilya Ehrenburg, Lyudi, Gody, Zhizn (People, Years, Life), vol. 2 (Moscow, 2005) p. 190. Cited in Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 282. 13. Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (New York, 1968), p. 64. 14. William Henry Chamberlin, “Stalin’s Holocaust,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1968. 15. Gerhart Niemeyer, “The Contribution of Robert Conquest,” National Review, March 24, 1970. 16. Edward Crankshaw, “Stalinist Nightmare,” The Observer, September 22, 1968. 17. David Joravsky, “Kremlinology: Power and Terror,” Nation, July 28, 1969. 18. Harrison Salisbury, “Mad Effi ciency for Extermination,” Saturday Review, November 9, 1968. 19. Alexander Gerschenkron, “On Dictatorship,” New York Review of Books, June 19, 1969. 20. George F. Kennan, “The Purges Unpurged,” New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1968. 21. Bertram D. Wolfe, review of The Great Terror, in Slavic Review, June 1969. 22. Alexander Rabinowitch, review of The Great Terror, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 383, May 1969. 23. Alec Nove, review of The Great Terror, in Soviet Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, April 1969. 24. Zvi Gitelman, review of The Great Terror, in Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 2, no. 1, 1969. 25. John Armstrong, review of The Great Terror, in The Russian Review, vol. 28, no. 3, July 1969. 26. Crankshaw, “Stalinist Nightmare.” 27. Harrison Salisbury, “Mad Effi ciency for Extermination,” Saturday Review, November 9, 1968. 28. Harrison Salisbury contributed a foreword to the paperback edition of my book Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Boston, 1981). 208 Notes 29. Niemeyer, “The Contribution of Robert Conquest.” 30. See William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), p. 514 and p. 675n95 for references to this controversy. 31. Niemeyer, “The Contribution of Robert Conquest.” 32. See Taubman, Khrushchev, for a comprehensive account of this period. 33. Niemeyer, “The Contribution of Robert Conquest.” 34. Cited in Conquest, Refl ections on a Ravaged Century, p. 123. 35. I don not have one substantial criticism of Joravsky’s review.