HISTORY

M ICHAEL B URLEIGH HE TOLD US SO

T HE D RAGONS OF E XPECTATION : R EALITY AND D ELUSIONINTHE C OURSEOF H ISTORY

★By Robert Conquest (Duckworth 256pp £18)

R ECENTLY I HAVE been reading some of the large-scale histories of the 1960s. A test of whether they are any good or not as guides to what was lasting and significant in that decade, when the ephemeral became an art form, has been seeing whether they mention the publication in 1968 of Robert Conquest’s masterly The Great Terror. One book does mention Conquest, but in the context of his friendships with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Most just drone on about the sexual appetites of juveniles or enthuse over the Beatles and rioting students. In addition to being a poet of some stature and author of works of science fiction, Conquest is the world’s most distinguished student of the former Soviet Union. His work has a richness of classical and literary allusion which is missing in that of Harvard historian Richard Pipes (like Conquest, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan), and he has been more prolific than the late Martin Malia, the Irish-American scholar whose achievement most resembles Conquest’s own. Six years ago Conquest published Reflections on a Ravaged Century, which amply illustrated Czeslaw Milosz’s astute remark: ‘The achievement of Robert Conquest becomes more obvious when we view it together with the behaviour of his contemporaries.’ Although he never made the comparison explicit, Conquest included brief flashes of autobiography which he juxtaposed with the careers of various academic apologists for Stalinism, whose delusions and lies he exposed on virtually every page. The son of an American father, Conquest spent his childhood in the South of France and then, after Winchester and Oxford, volunteered for the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry to fight the Nazis for five years. A chance offer to learn a new language while stationed in Italy in 1944 resulted in his posting as liaison officer to the Third Ukrainian Front of the Red Army in Bulgaria, where he remained for four years (at the British Military Mission in Sofia), witnessing the Communist takeover. Back in England, he joined the Information Research Division at the Foreign Office, became ‘Webb Fellow’ at the London School of Economics, and was briefly literary editor of The Spectator, although not necessarily in that order. He eventually left England for the Hoover

Institution at Stanford, where, now in his late eighties, he works in an office whose piles of books and papers testify to its occupant’s energy and interests. Conquest’s new book contains further tantalising snippets of autobiographical detail. There was a backpacking trip around Europe in 1937 with his friend John Blakeway, father of Britain’s leading documentary television producer, and a journey round Central Europe in an old truck a year later with John Willett, the Brecht expert. It would have been good also to have included his first and, until the 1990s, last visit to the Soviet Union, which he mentioned in the TV series he so brilliantly presented, Red Empire. He was filmed in a cell in the Peter and Paul fortress in Leningrad. The guides tut-tutted about the conditions of the individual prisoners incarcerated there before the Revolution. Conquest subsequently learned that fifty people were crammed into such cells after the Revolution, and that there were many more prisons packed to the gunwales in Leningrad during that period.

Conquest: sceptical voice

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The author recalls a nasty spat with the economist J K Galbraith that followed Conquest’s giving evidence to the US Congress contradicting that great liberal panjandrum’s own testimony on the putative robustness of the Soviet economy. He mentions the little seminar held at Stanford (which had been recently hit by an earthquake), where General Secretary Gorbachev conceded that, while the USSR had laws to protect buildings in such disasters, the authorities rarely enforced them – an anecdote designed to confound alleged comparabilities between the two societies. He is too modest to elaborate on his role in advising the then opposition leader Margaret Thatcher on how to deal with the Russians, his part in the West’s victory in the Cold War. Dragons of Expectation – the title alludes to the Poetic Edda – is another autobiography in fragments, as well as a development of Conquest’s ongoing exposure of myths and manias and the degraded state of much of contemporary academe. Although the book sometimes becomes almost epigrammatic, and shifts subjects like a projector showing slides, it is always beautifully written, and based firmly on the author’s moral sanity and passionate common sense. The most fascinating sections are those that deal with Communism and the Soviet Union. Conquest applies the materialist conception of history to the finances of global Communism. Forty-three foreign Communist parties received over $8 million in 1959, and eightythree were handed $15 million four years later, including the parties of Réunion and San Marino. Foreign Communist leaders, such as Britain’s Harry Pollit, trousered royalties on the Soviet editions of books that did not sell at home, while the collector wife of US ambassador John Davies, himself an adulator of Stalinism, was allowed the pick of the artworks at the Tretyakov Gallery at bargain-basement prices. There is a chilling illustration of the workings of the Marxist-Leninist mind in Conquest’s account of the rehabilitation in the 1960s of people shot after the 1938 Bukharin trial. One of the likely candidates for rehabilitation was the Uzbek Communist leader. A local party history reprinted a photo of him taken in the 1920s. But since he had not yet been formally rehabilitated, they hedged their bets – not by airbrushing him out entirely, or turning him into a jacket on the wall, a stretch of water, or a bush, as happened to images of Kamenev, Yezhov and many others, but by obscuring his face with a huge beard. Swathes of academia are

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treated with contempt throughout the book: Not only does Marxism, or at any rate a sort of subMarxism, still put out shoots in academic spheres that have been inadequately unweeded, but even nonutopian theorizing, attempts to inject rigor into the political – systems analysis, rational choice theory, path dependence – all tend to remove realities from academic work or, in many cases, to make real research and thought acceptable to academe only if provided with an attached theoretical view. Conquest devotes lengthy sections to exposing the shortcomings of the likes of E H Carr, Galbraith and the ubiquitous Eric Hobsbawm, whose ‘radically fictionalised story’ of the Bolshevik Revolution has had ‘a broad influence, or at any rate a broad seepage’ through such homages as that paid by Kirsty Wark, the BBC’s cultural tsarina, and the award of a Companionship of Honour to him, presumably not for services to a foreign tyranny. There is a devastating critique of the sloppily sinister, relativistic thinking that underpinned the CNN Cold War series, wherein the sufferings of Hollywood Communists at the hands of McCarthy were compared with ‘torture by the Inquisition’. Cut, so to speak, to Moscow and the dramatist Vsevolod Meyerhold. In his sixties, the imprisoned Meyerhold wrote a complaint to the prison authorities, commenting that he could still write since his interrogator, who had urinated into his mouth, had only broken his left arm. Later he complained again, about his legs, which had been so badly beaten that they felt like they had been immersed in boiling water. Meyerhold was shot a few months later after an ‘Inquisition’ that Hollywood leftists never experienced. Moreover, however despicable McCarthy was, his tactics were never translated to Western Europe, in the way that the NKVD introduced their habits to their Eastern European stooges. And so Conquest goes on, challenging any number of questionable comparisons. Four students were shot in the 1970s at Kent State University by nervous national guardsmen; according to CNN’s Ted Turner, this was comparable to the events at Tiananmen Square, where regular Chinese troops mowed down thousands with the aid of battletanks. In person, Robert Conquest is so softly spoken that one can injure one’s neck leaning in to hear him; his books employ another tone, like this one, whose voice is strong and true. May it ring out for a further decade in fine books like the Dragons of Expectation. To order this book at £14.40, see order form on page 78

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