Friday, 02.01.08

The Russian Conquest

Getty Images/Oleg Nikishin

An anniversary for nostalgic Cold Warriors

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Great Terror, poet and historian Robert Conquest's chronicle of Stalin's purges.  In addition to being a great read as history, it contains one of the author's few limericks clean enough to publish in a family magazine:

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
The great Marxist Stalin did ten in.

Any book that hits the unspeakably grim lows of the purges, as well as the mischievous and giddy highs of this sort of light verse, is a very good one indeed.  And yet historians have not been entirely kind to Conquest's research.

Conquest relied on testimony of exiles, a notoriously unreliable form of historical evidence, particularly at times of  ongoing conflict.  He had little archive access, and what access he did have -- the Smolensk archive, captured by the Nazis in the Second World War and then taken from them by the US afterward -- he chose not to exercise.

This low evidentiary standard attracted much-deserved criticism, and subsequent archival work led to revisions of his estimates.  But viewed in the context of the time, when serious people still doubted the extent of the enormity of Stalin's crimes, The Great Terror holds up well after 40 years.  The same cannot be said of many other works of history, or for that matter many other limericks.
— Graeme Wood

Filed Under: anniversary, Cold War, communism, history, Josef Stalin, Robert Conquest, Russia, Soviet Union