Robert Conquest
George Robert Acworth Conquest (1917-2015) was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to an American father, Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, and an English mother, Rosamund Alys Acworth.
Conquest was educated at Winchester College, where he won an exhibition to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1937 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Carlton Club. He was awarded an MA in PPE and a DLitt in history.
During WWII Conquest served in the British army. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia where he remained as the press officer.[1] In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.
After the War he engaged in writing on 20th Century history and especially on the Soviet Union, the subject of his most important work The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968). His criticism of Western defenders of the Soviet Union made him a controversial figure, and some challenged his estimates of the number of Russians killed in Stalin’s purges and wars.
Conquest spent the later part of his career at the Hoover Institution in California. His last book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999) looks at the role utopian centralizers have played in contemporary history.
The following selection is an interview with Karl Zinsmeister that appeared in The American Enterprise, January 2000. In it Conquest discusses the results of centralization in the USSR.