Conquest, Robert 1917-

(J.E.M. Arden, George Robert Acworth Conquest, Victor Gray, Ted Pauker)

PERSONAL: Born July 15, 1917, in Great Malvern, England; son of Robert Folger W. and Rosamund (Acworth) Conquest; married Joan Watkins, 1942 (divorced, 1948); married Tatiana Mihailova, 1948 (divorced, 1962); married Caroleen Macfarlane, 1964 (divorced, 1977); married Elizabeth Neece, 1979; children: (first marriage) John Christopher Arden, Richard Charles Pleasonton. Education: Attended Winchester College, 1931–35; University of Grenoble, 1935–36; Magdalen College, Oxford, B.A., 1939, M.A., 1972, D.Litt., 1974.

ADDRESSES: Home—52 Peter Coutts Cir., Stanford, CA 94305.

CAREER: Writer and scholar. H.M. Foreign Service, 1946–56, served in Sofia, Bulgaria, as press attaché and as second secretary, and as first secretary of British delegation to the United Nations; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, England, Sydney and Beatrice Webb Research Fellow, 1956–58; University of Buffalo (now State University of New York at Buffalo), Buffalo, NY, visiting poet and lecturer in English, 1959–60; Columbia University, Russian Institute, New York, NY, senior fellow, 1964–65; Smithsonian Institution, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, fellow, 1976–77; Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA, senior research fellow, 1977–; senior research fellow and scholar-curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States collection, 1981–; Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, Cambridge, MA, research associate, beginning 1983. Distinguished visiting scholar, Heritage Foundation, 1980–81; member of advisory board, Freedom House. Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, 1993. Military service: Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, 1939–46; served in the Balkans.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), British Academy (fellow), Society for the Advancement of Roman Studies, British Interplanetary Society (fellow), Travellers Club, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Literary Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: PEN Prize, 1945, for poem "For the Death of a Poet"; Festival of Britain verse prize, 1951; Officer, Order of the British Empire, 1955; Washington Monthly Book Award nomination, 1987, for The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine; grants from Ukrainian Research Institute and Ukrainian National Association; Alexis de Tocqueville Memorial Award, 1992; D.H.L. from Adelphi University, 1994; Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, 1994; American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Light Verse, 1997; Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, 1999; W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell Uncommon Book Award, 2001, for Reflections on a Ravaged Century; Fondazione Liberal Career Award, 2004; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2005; Ukranian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi, 2006.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(Under pseudonym J.E.M. Arden) Where Do Marxists Go from Here?, Phoenix House (London, England), 1958.

Common Sense about Russia, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1960.

The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1960, revised edition published as The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1970.

Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair: A Documentary Report on Its Literary and Political Significance, Collins (London, England), 1961, published as The Pasternak Affair: Courage of Genius: A Documentary Report, Lippincott (New York, NY), 1962.

Power and Policy in the USSR: The Study of Soviet Dynastics, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1961, published as Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession, 1945–60, Harper (New York, NY), 1967.

The Last Empire, Ampersand Books (Princeton, NJ), 1962.

The Future of Communism, Today Publications, 1963.

Marxism Today, Ampersand Books (Princeton, NJ), 1964.

Russia after Khrushchev, Praeger (New York, NY), 1965.

The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1968, 4th revised edition published as The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

The Human Cost of Soviet Communism. Prepared … for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, DC), 1970.

Where Marx Went Wrong, Tom Stacey (London, England), 1970.

V.I. Lenin, Viking (New York, NY), 1972, published in England as Lenin, Fontana (London, England), 1972.

(Translator) Aleksander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights: A Narrative Poem, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1977.

(With others) Defending America, introduction by James R. Schlesinger, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1977.

Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Viking (New York, NY), 1978.

Present Danger—Toward a Foreign Policy ("Guide to the Era of Soviet Aggression" series), Hoover Institution Press (Stanford, CA), 1979.

The Abomination of Moab (essays), M.T. Smith (London, England), 1979.

We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures, M.T. Smith (London, England), 1980.

(With others) The Man-made Famine in Ukraine, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (Washington, DC), 1984.

(With Jon Manchip White) What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1984.

Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939, Hoover Institution Press (Stanford, CA), 1985.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1986.

Tyrants and Typewriters (essays), Hutchinson (London, England), 1988, published as Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques from the Struggle for Truth, Lexington Books (Lexington, MA), 1989.

Stalin and the Kirov Murder, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Stalin: Breaker of Nations, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

History, Humanity, and Truth (lecture), Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University (Stanford, CA), 1993.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2005.

Associated with Documents in Dr. Robert Conquest, 'Harvest of Sorrow": Index, International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, [Toronto], 1988–90. Author of introduction to Vitaly Shen-talinsky's Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime, Free Press (New York, NY).

EDITOR

(With others) New Poems: A PEN Anthology, Transatlantic (Albuquerque, NM), 1953.

(And author of introduction) New Lines: An Anthology, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1956, second volume, Macmillan (London, England), 1963.

Back to Life: Poems from Behind the Iron Curtain, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1958.

(And author of introduction) Pyotr Yakir, A Childhood in Prison, Macmillan (London, England), 1972.

(And author of introduction) The Robert Sheckley Omnibus, Gollancz (London, England), 1973.

(And author of introduction) Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, McGraw (New York, NY), 1974.

The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future, Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA), 1986.

(With Susan J. Djordjevich) Political and Ideological Confrontations in Twentieth-Century Europe: Essays in Honor of Milorad M. Drachkovitch, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Literary editor, Spectator, 1962–63; editor, Soviet Analyst, 1971–73.

EDITOR, WITH KINGSLEY AMIS

Spectrum: A Science-Fiction Anthology, Gollancz (London, England), 1961, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.

Spectrum 2, Gollancz (London, England), 1962, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1963.

Spectrum 3, Gollancz (London, England), 1963, published as Spectrum: A Third Science-Fiction Anthology, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1964.

Spectrum 4, Gollancz (London, England), 1964, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1965.

Spectrum 5, Gollancz (London, England), 1966, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1967.

EDITOR, "SOVIET STUDIES" SERIES: PUBLISHED AS "THE CONTEMPORARY SOVIET UNION SERIES: INSTITUTIONS AND POLICIES" BY PRAEGER

Industrial Workers in the USSR, Bodley Head (London, England), 1967, Praeger (New York, NY), 1968.

Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice, Bodley Head (London, England), 1967, Praeger (New York, NY), 1968.

The Politics of Ideas in the USSR, Praeger (New York, NY), 1967.

Religion in the USSR, Bodley Head (London, England), 1968, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969.

The Soviet Police System, Bodley Head (London, England), 1968, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969.

The Soviet Political System, Bodley Head (London, England), 1968, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969.

Justice and the Legal System in the USSR, Bodley Head (London, England), 1968, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969.

Agricultural Workers in the USSR, Bodley Head (London, England), 1968, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969.

POETRY COLLECTIONS

Poems, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1955.

Robert Conquest Reading His Poems with Comment in the Recording Laboratory, April 21, 1960, Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1960.

Between Mars and Venus, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1962.

Arias from a Love Opera and Other Poems, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1969.

Casualty Ward, Poem-of-the-Month Club (London, England), 1974.

Coming Across, Buckabest Books, 1978.

Forays, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1979.

New and Collected Poems, C. Schlacks, 1986, Hutchinson (London, England), 1988.

Demons Don't, London Magazine Editions (London, England), 1999.

Also, contributor, under pseudonym Ted Pauker, to The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse; has also written under pseudonym Victor Gray.

NOVELS

A World of Difference: A Modern Novel of Science and Imagination, Ward, Lock (London, England), 1955, new edition, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1964.

(With Kingsley Amis) The Egyptologists, J. Cape (London, England), 1965, Random House (New York, NY), 1966.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A book of poems; a book of light verse; an autobiography.

SIDELIGHTS: Robert Conquest is known for his literary endeavors as well as for his scholarly writings on contemporary political history, most notably Russian affairs. While Conquest was establishing himself in the literary world, he was working for the British Foreign Service in Bulgaria and at the United Nations. After leaving governmental work in 1956, he took a position at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has since been affiliated with several universities and research institutes as an expert on Russian affairs. Arch Puddington, writing in Commentary, described Conquest as "the preeminent historian of the formation of the Stalinist system." Walter Goodman of the New York Times called him "perhaps the West's pre-eminent chronicler of the sufferings Communist rule has brought upon the Soviet people, especially during the reign of Stalin."

Conquest's writings on the former Soviet Union and communism have consistently documented the abuses of totalitarianism. Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist John Press explained that "Conquest has always displayed a firm hostility toward the USSR, but his views are neither irrational nor fanatical." Conquest's political works, Blake Morrison stated in The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s, uncover "Soviet injustice and brutality of various kinds." Nevertheless, Conquest has always been careful to explain that he is not deliberately writing anti-Soviet diatribes. "I'm a historian," Conquest told Bevis Hillier of the Los Angeles Times, "and at least part of it is that I like finding out facts that are hard to find out…. I'm just inquisitive."

The brutal reign of Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin has been the focus of several Conquest books, including The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities and Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties was the first book to fully document the political murders of Stalin's purges, a time in the late 1930s when many Soviet leaders were arrested and executed on false charges. It is "the definitive compilation of the horrors of Stalin's purges of 1936–38, when millions of people, mainly loyal Communists, were killed or sent to their deaths in prison camps at the hands of the secret police," according to a reviewer in the New York Times Book Review. This policy of mass murder enabled Stalin to consolidate his position as Soviet leader, eliminate his enemies and potential rivals, and terrorize the populace into submission. Conquest consulted some two hundred published volumes on the period, official government documents, and the accounts of émigrés and defectors to assemble the book. An Economist critic claimed it is "a masterpiece of historical detection," while Press speculated that "this massive, scholarly work may well be Conquest's most lasting achievement."

In The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine Conquest turns to another horrific episode in Stalin's reign, the widespread terror brought about by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. In 1930 Stalin declared that the nation's kulaks, the wealthier class of peasants, were to be "liquidated as a class." At the same time the kulaks were being executed or shipped to prison camps, poorer peasants were forcibly removed from their family farms and made to work on state-run, collective farms. All farmland became property of the government, and all farm produce became state property as well. To insure that the peasants would not steal any food while working in the fields, armed guards were put into watchtowers in prison camp style. Resistance to collectivization was intense. Some villages were bombed by military aircraft; many peasant families were arrested and shipped to Siberian prisons. When resistance was particularly fierce in the Ukraine—the Soviet Union's primary agricultural region—Stalin ordered all food in the area to be confiscated by the army. The Ukraine's borders were then sealed off so that hungry peasants could not leave to find food, while Russians in other areas were forbidden entry. According to Conquest's estimate, nearly eleven million people died during the famine and deportations—more than were lost by all nations in the First World War.

Because official Soviet history denied that the famine of the 1930s was caused by the communist government's policies, many of the facts concerning the period were suppressed. For example, when the Soviet census board of 1937 reported statistics showing the drastic drop in population during the decade, Stalin had the board members arrested and executed. The Soviet press was forbidden to comment on the famine. Blame for the drop in agricultural production, a fact that could not be hidden from outside observers, was attributed to such causes as sabotage, incompetent meteorologists, and the peasants of the Ukraine. Western newsmen were prohibited from visiting the region, while well-fed model villages were prepared by the secret police for the benefit of selected foreign visitors. Most Western observers disbelieved the scattered reports of a famine, finding it unlikely that such an event could be so well hidden. As Puddington explained, the facts were "obscured in a thick fog of official Soviet lies and the indifference of the West." Over half a century later, Conquest's book was the first comprehensive presentation of the facts about the deliberately created famine. Speaking to Goodman, Conquest revealed that he wrote The Harvest of Sorrow to "register previously not recognized facts on Western consciousness in a form weighty enough to be irrefutable."

Because of the long suppression of the tragedy, Patricia Blake explained in Time, the story of the famine has reached the West "only in fragmentary fashion, as the facts filtered through decades of unrelenting Soviet denial." To write his book, Conquest gathered first-person accounts from peasant survivors and from communist functionaries who later defected, and consulted secret Soviet documents smuggled to the West. His extensive research makes The Harvest of Sorrow the most complete picture available of the tragic event. "Reports of the famine … have long been available in the West," Goodman stated, "but not until now has it been rendered as fully or in such grim detail." As Eugene H. Methvin commented in the National Review, "Conquest has provided a fine, thoroughly documented full-dress historical study of this genocidal campaign."

Critical reaction to The Harvest of Sorrow ranks it as an important historical work with implications for contemporary political realities. Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Michael R. Marrus believed that "Conquest's well-documented book provides a crushing indictment of the Soviet experience in a measured and sober fashion…. We are dealing with a crime of terrible proportions—a continuing blot upon the Soviet leadership that has not yet acknowledged what happened." Methvin stated that the Soviet government was "ineluctably shaped by this dirty terrorist history…. The line of succession from Stalin to Gorbachev is unbroken…. Until the people in that apparatus today can openly examine their history and consider the need for constitutional safeguards, we must recognize that we are dealing with a mad machine capable of anything." John Gross admitted in the New York Times that "after Harvest of Sorrow there can be no excuse for ignoring what happened or playing down its enormity."

The breakup of the former Soviet Union, and the attendant release of its government's records, has brought vindication for many of Conquest's assertions. The author has also found a new audience for his work in Russia itself. "My books on the Stalin period have been published in large editions in Russia and the other East European countries with much acclaim, even before the end of the regime," he told CA. "Of course, I wrote my books on communism without any thought that they would be so published, and vindicated: they were entirely for the English, and other non-Soviet, readership." His intended audience notwithstanding, Conquest is now recognized as "the West's No. 1 expert on Stalin's purges," to quote Robert V. Daniels in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. A new edition of The Great Terror, published in 1990, led Daniels to comment: "Conquest has now updated and fleshed out his classic study of the purges. The extraordinary thing is how closely the new information fits with the conclusions he had to work out twenty years ago through scraps of evidence and logical conjecture." Spectator contributor Richard Lamb noted that events in modern Russian history have enhanced Conquest's reputation. "Today he is completely vindicated because a mass of evidence from Russia makes Conquest's charges irrefutable," Lamb concluded.

In 1999, Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century was released. Library Journal contributor Thomas A. Karel lauded Reflections on a Ravaged Century as "an important work of history and ideas" that contains "the reflective wisdom of a senior historian." Though this historical review of the twentieth-century looks outside Conquest's primary area of expertise, National Review contributor Robert Harris remarks that "Conquest's reflections on the century … [appropriately] concentrate … on the phenomenon of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union." "The Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 was the single great event … from which almost everything else … radiated," noted Harris. "The underlying theme of [Reflections on a Ravaged Century is] that Soviet history is finally a record of madness," analyzed Harris, elaborating: "He treats it, and with some reason, as a case study in collective delusion: a monument to a certain type of intellectual's capacity for seizing upon an Idea and pursuing it with a fanaticism that takes it beyond logic into the realm of the absurd." Harris went on to observe: "What is, perhaps, more pertinent to the modern reader [than the politically orchestrated death and suffering under Soviet Communism] … is to contemplate the extent to which a kind of mass psychosis overtook intelligent Western observers." Harris further noted that "[Reflections of a Ravaged Century] is, unexpectedly, a rather funny book." A Publishers Weekly critic saw the work as "a book that is as cantankerous as it is insightful." The same reviewer observed, "Conquest often writes with such contempt for those who seize on ideas that, in the end, he doesn't so much analyze history as scold it." Harris more positively commented: "Conquest, in the end, comes very close to issuing a plea for a kind of decent apathy and tolerant indifference towards politics: 'All the major troubles the world has had in our era have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania.'" Writing in Commentary, Aaron L. Friedberg noted this tendency: "Against the temptations of extremism, then, the best available protection is the 'nonideology of moderation.'" Friedberg concluded: "That is the lesson of the 20th century, a lesson that, in his long and distinguished career, Robert Conquest has done as much as any living writer to teach."

Conquest, "the cranky elder statesman of international politics," as Library Journal contributor Thomas A. Karel described him, draws on further lessons of the Cold War in his 2005, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History. In this work Conquest warns of new dangers in the world of the future, ones that liberals may not foresee. Frank Wilson, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called the work a "a short but highly concentrated book," which takes as its target, according to a critic for the Economist, "the left-liberal intelligentsia." Conquest contends in The Dragons of Expectation that the same sort of thinking that allowed liberals in the West to be seduced by Stalin is at work in the world today. For Conquest, institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations become suspect in such an analysis, and he goes on to blame academics on both sides of the Atlantic for deluding people about the dangers to an open society. Conquest proposes a union of English-speaking countries, "Anglosphere" headed by the United States and United Kingdom, to shore up the West against assault by enemies both exterior, such as Islam, and interior, such as a mindless consumer culture. For a Kirkus Reviews critic, Conquest's book was an "insightful, cantankerous pursuit of lingering lessons." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the same title "occasionally brilliant and at times idiosyncratic," and a work that will "infuriate as many readers as it gladdens." Wilson similarly noted: "No peace, love, and understanding clichés from Conquest."

In addition to Conquest's reputation as one of the world's leading specialists on Russian affairs, he is known as a poet and editor who played a pivotal role in a British literary school of the 1950s. Along with such figures as Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis, Conquest formed part of a loosely defined group called the Movement. These writers issued no manifesto of beliefs and agreed to no set literary theory, but their general approach to literature shared a common perspective. Each of the Movement writers disliked the overly emotional writing of the 1950s and were determined to restore a balance and order to literature.

With his New Lines: An Anthology, a collection of many of the Movement poets, Conquest helped establish the group as a viable presence on the British literary scene. He also presented their argument against the predominant poetry of the time. Poets, Conquest argued in his introduction to New Lines, have made "the mistake … of giving the Id, a sound player on the percussion side under a strict conductor, too much of a say in the doings of the orchestra as a whole." He called for a poetry "written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, sense and all." "The publication of New Lines," Morrison wrote, "changed the status of the Movement…. The group now had the imprint of a reputable publisher; it was the object of much comment in literary periodicals; it had even begun to attract attention abroad." In his 1984 essay, Press reported that New Lines "remains the most influential anthology published in England since World War II" and judged: "On the strength of New Lines alone Conquest merits a place in the development of postwar English poetry."

Conquest's debut poetry collection, Poems, was met with praise. The 1955 collection contains many pieces originally published in prominent British literary magazines. Press pointed to the impressive range of these early poems, a quality also found in Conquest's later collections. "I don't know why one writes poetry," Conquest once told CA. "I still publish two or three poems a year, and have a book nearly ready. The mere act of writing is easier in verse, in the narrow sense that it is not so long. My handwriting is illegible and I type very badly: so I dislike the actual writing, as against the research, of prose books quite a lot."

Conquest's first novel, A World of Difference: A Modern Novel of Science and Imagination, appeared in 1955. In the science fiction story Conquest plays some inside jokes, such as naming space ships after his literary friends. In the 1960s, Conquest returned to the science-fiction genre to co-edit, with longtime friend Kingsley Amis, the popular Spectrum science fiction anthologies.

Because of Conquest's success as both a poet and an expert on the former Soviet Union, Press called him a "man of affairs who is also a man of letters." Press observed: "It is rare for a man to be accepted by his fellows as an imaginative writer and, at the same time, as an authority on political matters." Conquest once told CA: "If I had to reconcile my various output, I think I would say that imagination is helpful in examining and establishing what are, on the face of it, highly improbable facts. In Russia they very often ask me incredulously how it was that Orwell understood them and many 'experts' didn't. Science fiction in particular is a great help: for it was truer to see the Communists as Martians than as good or bad humans of a normal world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Conquest, Robert, editor, New Lines: An Anthology, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1956, second volume, Macmillan (London, England), 1963.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945–1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Morrison, Blake, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s, Methuen (New York, NY), 1980.

Salmon, Arthur Edward, Poets of the Apocalypse, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1983.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1987, review of The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, p. 1240.

Commentary, June, 1987, Arch Puddington, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 74; February, 2001, Aaron L. Friedberg, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 59.

Economist, October 19, 1968, review of The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties; December 3, 2005, review of The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, p. 79.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 20, 1986, Michael R. Marrus, review of The Harvest of Sorrow.

Historian, fall, 2001, Kevin Smith, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 171.

Independent Review, winter, 2001, Stephen Cox, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 429.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2004, review of The Dragons of Expectation, p. 1074.

Library Journal, October 15, 1999, Thomas A. Karel, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 86; February 1, 2005, Thomas A. Karel, review of The Dragons of Expectation, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1986, Bevis Hillier, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 20, 1990, Robert V. Daniels, review of The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, pp. 1, 8.

Maclean's, December 15, 1986, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 56.

National Review, February 27, 1987, Eugene H. Methvin, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 48; February 17, 1992, Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., review of The Great Terror: A Reassessment and Stalin: Breaker of Nations, p. 45; November 8, 1999, Robert Harris, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 56; January 31, 2005, Arthur Herman, "The Prophet," review of The Dragons of Expectation.

New Leader, December 30, 1991, John P. Roche, review of Stalin, p. 25.

New Republic, November 3, 1986, Alec Nove, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 34; March 9, 1992, Terrence Emmons, review of Stalin, p. 33.

Newsweek, November 17, 1986, Jim Miller, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 95.

New York Review of Books, August 5, 1965, review of Russia after Khrushchev, p. 18; March 26, 1987, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 43; April 11, 1991, review of Stalin, p. 3.

New York Times, March 27, 1965, review of Russia after Khrushchev, p. 25; October 7, 1986, John Gross, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. C17; October 15, 1986, Walter Goodman, "Putting Pieces Together for Soviet Famine Book," p. C19.

New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1965, review of Russia after Khrushchev, p. 6; October 27, 1968, review of The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, p. 2; October 26, 1986, Craig R. Whitney, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 11; November 10, 1991, review of Stalin, p. 14.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 24, 2005, Frank Wilson, review of The Dragons of Expectation.

Publishers Weekly, September 13, 1991, review of Stalin, p. 72; September 20, 1999, review of Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 61; November 22, 2004, review of The Dragons of Expectation, p. 52.

Spectator, July 15, 1989, review of Stalin and the Kirov Murder, pp. 30-31; September 1, 1990, Richard Lamb, review of The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, p. 31; September 14, 1991, review of Stalin, pp. 29-30; November 19, 2005, Peregrine Worsthorne, "Blindfolds and Mind-mists," review of The Dragons of Expectation, p. 56.

Time, December 8, 1986, Patricia Blake, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 91.

Times (London, England), September 4, 1986, review of The Harvest of Sorrow.

Times Literary Supplement, September 2, 1965, review of Russia after Khrushchev, p. 752; September 20, 1991, review of Stalin, p. 5.

Washington Monthly, February, 1987, review of The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 59.

ONLINE

Hoover Institution Web site, http://www.hoover.org/ (November 7, 2005), "Hoover Institution's Robert Conquest toReceive Presidential Medal of Freedom"; (February 7, 2006), "Robert Conquest: Research Fellow."

Online News Hour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ (December 24, 1999), Elizabeth Farnsworth, "Interview with Robert Conquest."