36 Facts About Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books against communism.

Robert Conquest's books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s ; The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine ; and Stalin: Breaker of Nations.

Robert Conquest was the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.

Robert Conquest's father served in an American Ambulance Field Service unit with the French Army in World War I, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, with Silver Star in 1916.

Robert Conquest was educated at Winchester College, where he won an exhibition to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Robert Conquest took a gap year, spending time at the University of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, and returning to Oxford in 1937, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Carlton Club.

Robert Conquest was awarded an MA in PPE and a DLitt in history.

In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of the Second World War, Robert Conquest returned to England.

Robert Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him.

Robert Conquest continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.

At the Foreign Office, Robert Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work.

In 1950 Robert Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.

In 1956 Robert Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian.

In 1968 Robert Conquest published what became his best-known work, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938.

Robert Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges.

Robert Conquest cites various comments made by them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.

In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Robert Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by the IRD.

Robert Conquest was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire.

Robert Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.

Robert Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as "The Movement" which included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis.

Robert Conquest edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influential New Lines anthologies, introducing works by them, as well as Thom Gunn, Dennis Enright, and others, to a wider public.

When Larkin was in Hull, Robert Conquest sent him judicious selections of the latest pornography, and, when he came down to London, Robert Conquest took him on shopping trips to the Soho porn shops.

Robert Conquest had been a member of the British Interplanetary Society since the 1940s, and shared Amis's taste for science fiction.

Robert Conquest proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel that Robert Conquest had completed.

Robert Conquest published a science-fiction novel, A World of Difference.

In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, with Jon Manchip White, the fictional book What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide which was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion.

Robert Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear field NATO was only possibly matching USSR military power:.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a book devoted to the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Robert Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.

Robert Conquest focuses mainly on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became communists because they felt or believed that this was "anti-fascism" or "anti-Nazism".

Robert Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations:.

On 25 June 2003, John Derbyshire wrote in the National Review Onlines blog The Corner that "[a]s best I can remember", Robert Conquest conjectured three laws of politics:.

Robert Conquest was married four times, first in 1942 to Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons.

In 1981 Robert Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow.

Robert Conquest was a fellow of the Columbia University's Russian Institute, and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a distinguished visiting scholar at The Heritage Foundation; a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute.

Robert Conquest died in 2015 in Stanford, California, at the age of 98, of respiratory failure as a result of Parkinson's disease.

Robert Conquest was a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and the British Interplanetary Society, and a Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.