Robert Conquest and Quadrant

A lively exchange within the Quadrant circle erupted a few years ago between Robert Conquest and Paul Monk (backed by the historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft). It was in 1999-2000. The controversy grew out of an article by Monk titled “Moral and Statistical Reckoning”, which argued that in his historic book of 1968, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, Conquest had over-estimated the number of people killed in Stalin’s Gulag. Drawing on all available sources including Soviet records (and not merely reports of the “Moscow trials” which accounted for comparatively few victims), Conquest had estimated that the total number killed was close to 20 million. At that time many (not all) historians and intellectuals like J.-P. Sartre and most mainstream journalists still claimed that the true figure was anything from a few hundred to a few thousand. Conquest’s scholarly The Great Terror was a turning-point, reinforced a few years later by Solzhenitsyn’s master-work The Gulag Archipelago. In his later and revised edition of The Great Terror, drawing on such Soviet archives which had by then become available, Conquest basically stayed, with some modifications, with his original estimate. (Some writers like the British historian Norman Davies claim the true figure is closer to 50 million.)

But Monk was respectfully sceptical. Relying on Soviet archives that had been released to researchers after 1991, he drastically reduced Conquest’s figures—in the case of Kolyma, for example, between 1937 and 1944, he found that 250,000 died, not three million. He concluded that it is of “immense cognitive and moral importance” that we make our reckoning “rigorously and responsibly, morally and statistically”. (My italics.) He seemed to be implying that Conquest did not pass the moral test. In a letter to the editor, Stephen Wheatcroft of Melbourne University commended Monk’s article.

In his rejoinder Conquest testily referred to Monk’s “almost incredible distortions of data” and his reliance on unreliable KGB sources. He concluded: “Monk like others of his school impugns my motives. I refrain from the obvious retort. Muddle-headedness, misquotation and unreliability are sufficient disqualification.”

To those who knew Conquest it was plain that his acerbity was due not simply to Monk’s criticism of his figures but far more to the suggestion that he lacked moral substance. This seemed clear not only in the title of Monk’s critique (“Moral and Statistical Reckoning”) but in references throughout the article.

Conquest had spent many years of his life immersing himself in the study of the Soviet Union. He brought to it the moral imagination of a gifted historian, the insight of a poet and the skill of a statistician. His motivation was essentially a moral abhorrence of the Evil Empire. He understood the mindset of Soviet apologists (and had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth). He had for many years endured indifference to his work and contempt for his findings. To be charged, as it seemed to him, at the very time of his vindication, with defective moral judgment and inadequate, even slovenly, research, was not something he could or would shrug off. The exchange with Paul Monk remains a small locus classicus of Quadrant controversies—and of Conquest’s polemical style.

Conquest was always a friend and supporter of Quadrant—and a contributor. He first appeared in the magazine in 1964 in a symposium on the Sino-Soviet split. Donald Horne was editor at the time. (The bit that I remember best is Conquest’s quip about Lenin’s advice to Gorky that he should avoid Bolshevik doctors at all costs and always go to a bourgeois one. The former would be crackpots.) A few years later I was able to persuade Conquest to do a monthly column, a London Letter, for Quadrant, which he continued during Sam Lipski’s editorship. His range was wide. He began with a report on education in England: “millions of parents may not want an academic education for their children but they want a sound decent education for them—which is being denied them by progressive maniacs and bureaucratic morons”. Then he took up the defence of the CIA against the almost universal attacks on it, not least for its subsidy to the brilliant London magazine Encounter: “Even the Guardian remarked that if the CIA had supported such an independent magazine, so much the better for the CIA.”

On Solzhenitsyn he had this to say: “He naturally gave offence to a lot of people who think of themselves as socialists by his remark that ‘Socialist democracy’ was an expression of the same type as ‘boiling ice’.”

On Left conformism: “As the Gadarene swine approached the cliff, careful observers noted that they could be divided into various categories. ‘Extremists’, at full gallop, would be over the edge almost at once. ‘Moderates’ would be several seconds behind them. But there also ‘conservatives’ in two groups: ‘progressive conservatives’, going at no more than a trot, would not reach the edge for a full minute. And here and there were to be seen pigs who took a careful look at the prospect before them and actually turned and ran back. It was these who were known as ‘reactionaries’.”

On public opinion: “The opinion polls show that the public is overwhelmingly in the ‘reactionary’ camp over defence, bureaucracy, trade unions, housing, grammar schools, pornography, the House of Lords, the police and crime … They also show that on many of these it does not know that the Conservatives are the ones who propose the policies it wants.”

On Europe: “The English-speaking countries have diverged indeed, but not too much. There seems no doubt of the results of a poll if put in the following form: ‘Given the choice Britain’s future will be with the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand—or with Europe?’ Democratic politicians, please note.”

Negotiating with the Soviet Union: “It should be obvious that there are times when inaction is preferable to action. When it comes to the total problem presented to us by the Soviet leadership, in which the issues are nuclear and world enslavement, it is still not absolutely clear that all Western statesmen and leaders of opinion understand that here too, and even more profoundly, there is, under all the smooth-talking diplomacy, a motivation quite alien to the notions of amity and adjustment which seem natural in Washington and London.”

Conquest rarely commented on Australian affairs. He frequently visited Australia and had many friends here but a certain caution and modesty restrained him from laying down the law about Australia to Australians. He would occasionally review an Australian book if it was in his field—for example Paul Dibb’s The Soviet Union: The Incomplete Superpower (1986) where he deplored the application of “common sense” to an alien political culture—an establishmentarian rather than left-wing fault. (“Chamberlain misunderstanding Hitler, Roosevelt misunderstanding Stalin.”)

As well as writing for Quadrant, he frequently gave lectures in Australia (including the Latham Memorial Lecture in 1972). I often acted as his informal taxi driver on these occasions, transporting him in my car to various meetings where he was guest speaker. I recall taking him to a huge Ukrainian rally in the western suburbs of Sydney where he was given a hero’s welcome and applauded to the echo. They even loudly applauded me as an associate of Conquest!

But if he was modestly reticent about Australians, he knew he had certain genuine qualifications. “No one who has been on what appeared to be an all-night pub crawl in Newcastle NSW with James McAuley can indeed be totally ignorant of Australian essentials.”

His most significant statement on Australia and Australian culture was his review of the 1982 anthology Quadrant Twenty-Five Years, edited by Lee Shrubb, Vivian Smith and me. The length of Conquest’s review makes it difficult to summarise. (It appeared in the March 1983 issue of Quadrant.) The anthology contains thirteen sharp or rambling reflections on Persons and Places with illustrations by Sprod and Molnar; eleven Arguments; seven pieces on Writers and Artists; nine short stories; and fifty poems (which as a poet Conquest particularly enjoyed). He finally located unity in the anthology’s “pervasive charitableness”: when anger is displayed it is the generous anger which Orwell noted in Dickens. He concluded:

Quadrant has survived and flourished in a jungle full of pygmies with poisoned arrows and has succeeded in [James] McAuley’s original aim of bringing together in many spheres of thought and art the essence of the Australian variant of the culture of free humanity. For this volume is above all a cross-section of a magazine, one of the few in the world that could produce such a broad assembly of material. That is to say, it represents culture in its profoundest and most comprehensive sense, in politics, the arts, philosophy, human experience. Australia is lucky to have it. So are we in the world at large.

As we in the world at large were lucky for ninety-eight years to have had Robert Conquest as a guide, ally and friend.