Robert Conquest, after Leon Trotsky arguably the chief anticommunist and anti-Stalin propagandist of the 20th century, has died. Naturally, the capitalist media are fawning over him.
A lot could be said about Conquest. I'll say a
bit at the end.
Here are some facts -- I have checked them --
concerning Conquest's most famous book _The Great Terror_:
Robert Conquest has also been identified as having worked for the IRD from when
it was set up until 1956. The Information Research Department (IRD), was a
section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau)
whose main task was to combat Communist influence throughout the world by
planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to
influence public opinion.
A 1978 story in the The Guardian alleged that Conquest's work there was to contribute to the so-called "black history" of the Soviet Union -- in other words, fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion.
After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with Secret Service support. His book The Great Terror, a basic anti-communist text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services.
The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources. Conquest's book was intended for presentation to "useful fools", such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV. Conquest to this day remains, for anti-communist historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.
A 1978 story in the The Guardian alleged that Conquest's work there was to contribute to the so-called "black history" of the Soviet Union -- in other words, fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion.
After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with Secret Service support. His book The Great Terror, a basic anti-communist text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services.
The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources. Conquest's book was intended for presentation to "useful fools", such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV. Conquest to this day remains, for anti-communist historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.
The article from _The Guardian_ in 1978
documents the propaganda activities of the IRD:
and
In his Ph.D. dissertation, but not in the book
that he wrote from it, Arch Getty pointed out:
The
dominant tendency [in writing the history of the "purges"] has
been automatically to believe anything an emigre asserted while automatically
denying the truth of everything from the Stalinist side. If one wanted a
balanced picture of Tsar Ivan IV, ("The Terrible"), one would
not accept at face value the descriptions of the exiled Prince Kurbsky in
Poland, during a period of Russo-Polish war.
If one wanted a balanced picture of
Mao Tse-Tung's regime in China, one would not accept Chiang Kai-Shek's version
in the early 1950's as essentially reliable.
If one were not interested in such
a view, one would. The apparent monstrosity of Stalin's crimes and a generation
of Cold War attitudes have contributed to what would be considered sloppy
scholarship in any other area of inquiry.
Getty also pointed out that Conquest specialized in anticommunist propaganda masquerading as scholarship while working for British intelligence.
Sometimes, the "scholarship" had
been more than simply careless. Recent investigations of British intelligence
activities (following in the wake of U.S. post-Watergate revelations), suggest
that Robert Conquest, author of the highly influential Great Terror, accepted
payment from British intelligence agencies for consciously falsifying
information about the Soviet Union. Consequently, the works of such an
individual can hardly be considered valid scholarly works by his peers in
the Western academic community.
-
Getty, "The Great Purges Reconsidered," Ph.D. disseration, Boston
College, 1979, p. 48.
In 1980 I interviewed Professor John Hazard of
Columbia University, at the time the world expert on Soviet law.
Hazard told me that people in the Soviet
studies field had told him that British intelligence was still doing Conquest's
research for him.
...Conquest (Terror, 754) ...
makes the astounding statement that "Truth can thus only percolate in the
form of hearsay." And, further, "On political matters basically
the best, though not infallible, source is rumor ... ". He believes that
the best way to check rumors is to compare them with other rumors--a
dubious procedure given the fact that emigres read each others' works. Of
course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence in any
other field of history.
- Getty, "The Great Purges Reconsidered," Ph.D. disseration, Boston College, 1979, p. 64 note 57.
Already in 1979 Getty concluded:
The
point of view adopted here is that the standard interpretations of the
"Great Purges", such as those by Fainsod and Conquest, are seriously
flawed, cannot account for the
available evidence, and are thus no longer tenable. (53)
A good reply to Conquest's dishonesty is the
article by Robert W. Thurston,
"On Desk-Bout Parochialism, Commonsense
Perspective, and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest," in Slavic
Review 1986, 238-244.
I don't see any other scholar officially in
the field of Soviet history ever daring to attack Conquest head-on in print, in
a mainstream journal.
Conquest replied in kind, trashing Thurston's
book on the history of the USSR in the 1930s when it was published by Yale
University Press in 1996. Thurston's book was by far the best book on this
period up to that point and is still the best because he rejects the knee-jerk
anticommunist, anti-Stalin line and sticks to the evidence, with only a handful
of lapses.
Thurston also published an excellent article
showing the dishonesty of the term "Great Terror" by pointing out
that very, very few people were in fact "terrorized."
"Fear and Belief in the USSR's 'Great Terror': Response
to Arrest, 1935-1939." Slavic Review 45 (1986), 214-234.
(This article elicited a hostile but very weak
response by Conquest, to which Thurston replied with the article about
"loosy evidence," quoted above.
After Conquest's book on the Ukrainian famine,
_Harvest of Sorrow_ was published in the 1980s the anticommunist experts in the
Soviet history field universally rejected it. You can read some qutatoins from
them in the article by Jeff Coplon, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust. A
55-year-old Famine Feeds the Right." _Village
Voice_ January 12, 1988. Coplon's article, with quotations from the
anticommunist scholars, is at
Of course there was no deliberate famine. Quite
the opposite: Collectivization put an end to famines in Russian - Ukraine.
Conquest later retracted his view that Stalin
had deliberately caused the famine. I have the quotation from him in my book
_Blood Lies_.
* * * * *
After my book _Khrushchev Lied_ was published
in Russia I was interviewed by _Literaturnaia Rossia_, a literary-cultural
journal. The interviewer asked me some tough questions, which was fine!
Part of my reply was about Conquest's book _The
Great Terror_:
As a
graduate student from 1965-69 I opposed the US war in Vietnam. At one point
somebody told me that the Vietnamese communists could not be the "good
guys", because they were all "Stalinists", and "Stalin had
killed millions of innocent people."
I
remembered this remark. It was probably the reason that in the early 1970s I
read the first edition of Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror when it was
published. I was shaken by what I read!
I
should add that I could read the Russian language since I had already been
studying Russian literature since High School. So I studied Conquest’s book
very carefully. Apparently no one else had ever done this!
I
discovered Conquest was dishonest in his use of sources. His footnotes did not
support his anti-Stalin conclusions! Basically, he used any source that was
hostile to Stalin, regardless of whether it was reliable or not.
-
"The Sixty-One Untruths of Nikita Khrushchev. " At
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/litrossiainterv0608_eng.html
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/litrossiainterv0608_eng.html
Conquest -- with the help of the British
intelligence service --took the lies about the Stalin period concocted under
Khrushchev and by him, added more lies from anticommunist sources in the West
like Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky, and presented this as
"history."
Lots of footnotes, which are intended to fool
the educated but naive reader. But those same footnotes made it possibel for me
to discover that Conquest used phony evidence and _never_ proved "any_ of
his anticommunist, anti-Stalin claims.
25 years later, when Gorbachev took up
Khrushchev's anticommunist and anti-Stalin lies, repeated them, and added more
lies of his own, Conquest issued a new edition of _The Great Terror_ and told
everybody "I was right."
He wasn't "right." Gorbachev was
simply telling the same kinds of lies, and often the very same lies, about the
Stalin period that Khrushchev and his people had told.
* * * * *
Conquest got a lot of honours from the
mass-murdering imperialists, from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan and
beyond. He earned their praise. He also got a cushy, high-paying post at
the Hoover Institution.
Such are the rewards for telling lies on behalf
of the anticommunists.
We should realize that no one so honoured by the
chief mass murderers of world history can ever be telling the truth.
See Also :
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/losurdo-on-stalin-review-by-roland-boer.html
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