Vol. 41 No. 2 · 24 January 2019
pages 13-15 | 3886 words
Sheila Fitzpatrick
...MUCH MORE
- BuyThe Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties by Robert Conquest
Bodley Head, 576 pp, £20.00, November 2018, ISBN 978 1 84792 568 8- BuyThe Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest
Bodley Head, 412 pp, £20.00, November 2018, ISBN 978 1 84792 567 1They say [disapprovingly] that we were Cold Warriors. Yes, and a bloody good show, too. A lot of people weren’t Cold Warriors – and so much the worse for them.Robert Conquest, quoted by Jay Nordlinger in National Review, 9 December 2002There are rules for writing about the enemy in wartime. You must never forget that your side and his are at war, and that your side is right and his is wrong. Your writing must not give aid or comfort to the enemy. It should never humanise the other side but rather emphasise its essential, evil otherness. Overt partisanship is not just allowed in time of war but required. Even-handedness, if you choose to write about the enemy, would amount to treason.Whether the same rules applied to writing about the Soviet Union during the Cold War (which after all was a war of words even if guns weren’t involved) became a big issue in Sovietology in the 1970s. There were young people like me who had recently come into the academic field and thought they should be able to write about the Soviet Union the way they wrote about everything else – that is, as objectively as they could. And there were people like Robert Conquest, a quarter-century older, formed in different intellectual and political circumstances, who thought the opposite.
Sovietology emerged as an academic profession, US-centred, in the 1950s, when generous Cold War funding vastly increased the size of the field while at the same time institutionalising the ‘know your enemy’ approach. But before it became an academic profession, it was a practice developed by Western – i.e. British and American – intelligence agencies. The Soviet Union, with frontiers firmly closed since the early 1930s, was cut off from the rest of the world to an extent that is now hard to imagine. To find out about its politics, or any other aspect of it, you had to acquire proficiency in close reading of Pravda and a few other key texts, supplemented by defectors’ accounts, intelligence reports and diplomatic gossip. These techniques, developed in intelligence agencies, made their way into the new academic field of Soviet studies under the name of Kremlinology.
Khrushchev’s Thaw brought a partial opening of the Soviet Union to the West, in the form mainly of cultural exchanges that took the younger generation of scholars from the US and the UK (including me) on year-long visits. The informal view of these exchanges in the West was that we sent them our bona fide young historians and literary scholars to research their Harvard and Oxford PhDs, while they sent us spies in the guise of scientists. From the Soviet standpoint, both sides sent their spies, since those Western PhD students, however academically legitimate, were bound to be trying to ferret out Soviet secrets. This assumption on the part of the Soviets was a disadvantage for us exchangees, but not a crippling one. We had a good time ferreting out the secrets relevant to our PhDs, learning by the seat of our pants how Soviet society worked, and making friends (despite official discouragement from both sides) with a few Russians.
For most of the older generation of Sovietologists, however, spending extended time in the Soviet Union was not an option. In the 1950s, some who later became academics had served in the British and US embassies in Moscow, but the Soviets had kicked a number of the most inquisitive out of the country as spies. In the 1960s and 1970s, when alumni of the exchanges were starting to make an impact on the field, Western Sovietologists of the older generation didn’t for the most part even apply for Soviet visas, knowing that the Russians would suspect them of intelligence connections, whether or not they had them.
Whether Soviet studies were to be seen in the 1970s as a ‘normal’ academic field or a branch of the Cold War was in dispute. Another quarrel, largely brought about by the exchanges, involved a difference of opinion between younger scholars who had recently been to Russia and older scholars who hadn’t. The former felt they had a first-hand understanding of Soviet society that the older generation lacked as well as having had much broader access to primary data and sources than was possible in the West, while the latter suspected the younger generation of, at best, tailoring academic projects to make them acceptable to the Soviets, and hence steered clear of touchy topics like the Great Purges, and, at worst, were brainwashed by their Soviet hosts. ‘The Russians are people’ was a working assumption among young Western ‘revisionist’ scholars as well as a slogan popular with supporters of political détente. The reason this apparent truism seemed important was that many of their seniors in Sovietology appeared not to believe it.
Born in 1917 to an American father and English mother, public-school and Oxford-educated, Robert Conquest made his first substantial contacts with the Soviet Union through his work in British intelligence during and after the Second World War. His first-hand sustained observation of communism in action took place in postwar Bulgaria (though some sources say he briefly visited the Soviet Union in 1937, during a short phase of Oxford student communism). From 1948 to 1956 he served in the Foreign Office’s secret Information Research Department, whose purpose was both to gather information about the Soviet Union (especially its misdeeds), and to disseminate it – in other words, to conduct counter-propaganda in a Cold War context. Conquest’s style of work and presentation was clearly formed by his IRD experience; and, as the quotation at the top of this review indicates, that was something for which he saw no need to apologise.
His initial specialty, which he defended vigorously throughout his life, was Kremlinology: the study of personal alignments – i.e. the pecking order – at the top of Soviet politics, deduced from a close reading of Pravda as well as non-public sources. In Conquest’s view, this was a necessary discipline in ‘areas where the information is not adequate and a great effort has to be made to force the deductions from recalcitrant material’. Academic political scientists tended to look down on it, however, as failing to offer a conceptual model or systems analysis (for Conquest irrelevant when dealing with one-man rule). In the US, where attachment to models was stronger than it was in the more pragmatic UK, Conquest’s first book, Power and Policy in the USSR (1961), ran into some criticism on these grounds. Thereafter, a tinge of mutual scepticism and condescension informed his relationship with academia, despite the coincidence of Cold War views between Conquest and most academic Sovietologists.
The Soviet Union was not Conquest’s only persistent interest. From student days, he was deeply involved in poetry, both as a writer of it and a polemicist on behalf of the Movement, a trend that favoured everyday life without ‘poetic’ dressing-up. His friends and collaborators in this endeavour were Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and the three of them shared both a cheeky undergraduate misogyny, manifest in Conquest and Amis’s spoof, The Egyptologists, and a liking for pornography memorably documented in Andrew Motion’s 1994 biography of Larkin. Satire and light verse were among Conquest’s strengths as a poet. He also wrote science fiction, co-operating with Amis on five anthologies of new sci-fi writing in the 1960s as well as publishing his own sci-fi novel, A World of Difference (1955), and was a lifelong member of the British Interplanetary Society.
It’s a useful context for understanding Conquest the Sovietologist. Anti-communist he certainly was, but never of the earnest or anguished variety. While he deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, his approach had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe Brumberg’s Yiddish-joke inflected, USIA-sponsored journal Problems of Communism in the US – tended towards the deadly serious. For Conquest, the Soviet Union was no doubt an evil place, but above all it was a bizarre one, a society whose baroque self-inventions and elaborate mendacity made it an apt subject of black comedy.
The Great Terror, first published in 1968, was an expansion of Conquest’s range from pure Kremlinology to a historical study of what are usually known as ‘the Great Purges’ of the late 1930s; and it brought his first big international success. While contemporary reviewers saw the book as placing the comparatively familiar Moscow Trials of 1936-38 in a broader context, those trials are still its dramatic centrepiece. Conquest’s basic sources are newspapers, defectors’ accounts, and some Soviet fictional and memoir treatments from the time of the Thaw. The prose is workmanlike (probably similar, like his sources, to that of his earlier IRD reports), but enlivened by occasional throwaway witticisms. The Moscow show trials, with their high camp drama, unexpected confessions from former political leaders, and Stalin the magician pulling the strings from behind the scenes, provided the perfect subject for him.
For Conquest, the Soviet Union’s otherness was absolute, and the Great Purges best seen through a prism of science fiction. Stalin as purger-in-chief did not have the ring of ‘a modern man, a terrestrial man, an earth man’, Conquest once said: ‘He sounds like a monster from some strange planet. I’ve written a science fiction novel amongst my various writings … and I think Stalin would fit in very well as a nonhuman.’ This worked not just for Stalin but for the Soviet Union in general, Conquest argued: ‘A science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn’t so much whether they’re good or bad, exactly; they’re not bad or good as we’d be bad or good. It’s far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us.’...
