Volume 47, Number 5 · March 23, 2000
The Man Who Was Right
By Michael Ignatieff
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
by Robert Conquest
Norton, 317 pp., $25.95
One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure. He is eighty-two years old, a British historian, poet, and political writer, and longtime research fellow at Stanford. His best-known works—Kolyma (1978), The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), The Great Terror (1990)—laid bare the system of terror and extermination at the heart of the Communist state. He wrote them at a time when détente with the Soviet Union was the fashion, when even conservative opinion no longer believed that the Soviet sys-tem was propelled by murderous and expansionist energies. Soviet communism, Conquest argued, must either live by expansion or die of its contradictions. It remained inherently Leninist in its hostility toward bourgeois liberal democracies, and as such could not be treated as a normal state within the international system.
Review, 3056 words
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