I have been reading a collection of Robert Conquest’s recent essays: Relfections on a Ravaged Century, and I commend them to everyone interested in twentieth century history.
I have spent half my adult life getting my head straight by reading Robert Conquest. How many copies of The Great Terror have I owned? He is one of the great truth-tellers, and I have sat enthralled at his feet.
In his advanced age, Conquest has been elevated to the status of a (harmless) icon. In 2010, only the most shameless pro-Soviet revisionists still have the nerve to sneer at him, but I can easily remember when this scholarly Anglo-American Solzhenitsyn was a pariah everwhere in British and American intellectual discourse. Later, (once it became clear that challanging Conquest’s scholarship only proved that the critic was a fool), the standard attack became to grant him (minimum) points, inconspicuously disguised in an otherwise large bouquet of ad hominen insults.
Through some miracle of human decency, Conquest has somehow managed to keep working through five decades of scholarly sneering without ever once putting a polemical foot wrong. He has been the perfect gentleman first, last, and always. Yet, as some of these essays show, even Conquest is capable of becoming a tad ticked off after seeing the major truths he was telling, and telling for the first time, being greeted once again by what the Vatican calls “invincible ignorance.”
Yet in all those storms of stupidity, did Conquest ever lose his composure or his dignity or his judgment?
Nor did ever back down from the truths he was telling the corrupt, the incredulous, and the rest of us.
A few years ago, I got a call from The New Criterion, asking whether I would attend a special gala lunch being held in honor of this great historian. I answered that I would not only be honored to attend, I would honored to wait on table at such an event.
I repeat my offer. To anyone planning a testimonial dinner for Robert Conquest, I am ready to put on my white waiter’s jacket. Salmon, chicken, or beef?