GLENN GARVIN: RIP Robert Conquest, Stalin’s Prosecutor.
To understand the moral and literary power with which Robert Conquest wrote, consider the second sentence in his book Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, a study of the 14.5 million deaths that resulted from Joseph Stalin’s murderous takeover of his nation’s agricultural sector: “We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.” . . .
He wrote of a town in Byelorussia where a group of peasants stumbled into what may have been the perpetually depressed Soviet economy’s single growth industry: professional informing. They routinely partied after trials with the 15 rubles a head they were paid to denounce neighbors as spies, hoarders, and “wreckers,” as saboteurs were known. They even wrote an epic ballad about some of their most successful denunciations.
He wrote of the urkas, the labor-camp gangs of common criminals so violent and depraved that even the guards feared them and refused to make them work. The hideously tattooed members, sporting names like Hitler or The Louse, instead spent their days plotting mass rapes of female inmates and gambling for the clothing of newly arrived political prisoners; the losers had to strip it from the victims and deliver it to the winners.
He wrote of Stalin’s workdays, which usually began by leafing through hundreds of secret-police-recommended death sentences left in his morning inbox, perhaps with the help of his sycophantic adviser Vyacheslav Molotov. December 12, 1937, was a typical day, Conquest reported: “Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.”
Not that being a bloodthirsty dictator was all work and no play. Conquest described Stalin laughing until he cried as an executioner acted out the final, sobbing moments of his former crony Grigory Zinoviev. “Stalin was overcome with merriment and had to sign to [the performer] to stop,” Conquest wrote. . . .
As skeptics of the Cold War gained the upper hand in American academia, Conquest’s work was dismissed as reactionary fantasy and criminal libel. But in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Moscow’s archives began dribbling out to the public, his reporting was confirmed and judged by some even a bit too mild.
But Stalin gets a pass — basically, because he had so many supporters in media and academe that really acknowledging his horror would be uncomfortable.