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Here at Accuracy in Academia, we mostly get to cover only ersatz intellectuals. Actual scholars, we too frequently find, are far fewer in number. The ranks of them just got thinner this month with the passing of Robert Conquest and Peter Schramm. “Robert Conquest spent decades estimating a casualty rate amassed from the testimony of defectors,” I noted in 2009. “Most academics denigrated his work, relying on Soviet government statistics instead.” “Few of them volunteered to carry Conquest on their shoulders when his numbers proved closer to the actual count than theirs. For this reason, he wanted to retitle the...

Russian officials have ordered to inspect and remove books by well-known British historians John Keegan and Antony Beevor from libraries, saying they promote Nazi-era stereotypes. The move is among a raft of measures to streamline historical narrative by limiting alternative viewpoints, as well as ending the perceived foreign influence from fields such as education. The regional education ministry in Sverdlovsk, near the Ural Mountains, issued a decree telling school and university libraries to 'check the availability of books' by the historians and 'take measures to remove them from access by students and teaching staff'.

'Robert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, died on Monday in Stanford, Calif. He was 98. His wife, the former Elizabeth Neece, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr. Conquest, a poet and science-fiction buff, turned to the study of the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s out of dissatisfaction with the quality of analysis he saw at the British Foreign Office, where he worked after World War II in the Information Research Department, a semi-secret office responsible for...

Anglo-American historian and poet who chronicled Stalin’s excesses dies in Palo Alto, Calif.Robert Conquest, an Anglo-American historian whose works on the terror and privation under Joseph Stalin made him the pre-eminent Western chronicler of the horrors of Soviet rule, died Monday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 98 years old. Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the...

Robert Conquest, an Anglo-American historian whose works on the terror and privation under Joseph Stalin made him the pre-eminent Western chronicler of the horrors of Soviet rule, died Monday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 98 years old. Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr....

The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine are going on display in England. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones entered Ukraine in March 1933, at the height of an artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as part of his campaign to force peasants into collective farms. Millions starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock. Jones' reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention. "Famine Grips Russia - Millions...

The Great Terror by: Jeff Waldmann, July 29, 2008 As a new edition of his illuminating book, The Great Terror, makes its way to the shelves, author Robert Conquest reflected back on the torrent of illuminating information about the former Soviet Union that has come out since the first edition was published four decades ago. Perhaps most shocking of all of Conquest’s revelations is that even members of the Soviet Politburo did not definitively know the truth about atrocities committed by the communist regime. This became the subject of much contentious debate under Mikhail Gorbachev. Conquest, a research fellow at...

Hryhory Haraschenko tells the stories feverishly, in a voice that brooks no interruption, gesticulating wildly with veined hands. He hauls out his stash of carefully bundled newspaper clippings, witness' tales and pencil-drawn maps. ... At 89, Haraschenko is among a dwindling number of Ukrainians who survived the Soviet-era famine of the early 1930s. Like other survivors and some historians, he regards the starvation -- known here as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger" -- as an act of genocide engineered to wipe out the Ukrainians. He wants it discussed, and he wants it recognized by the world. "Russia is afraid...

I recently finished Robert Conquest's Harvest Of Sorrow. It was not a fun book to read, but it was very informative and hard to put down. The descriptions of the Ukrainian Famine were horrifying and heartrending.One that sticks with me as I write this is of a mother burying her child who had just died of starvation. Russian soldiers accused her of digging a grain pit, so they dug the child up to satisfy their suspicions, and left her to bury him again.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Those who were born in Year One of the Russian Revolution are now entering their 10th decade. Of the intellectual class that got its vintage laid down in 1917, a class which includes Eric Hobsbawm, Conor Cruise O'Brien and precious few others, the pre-eminent Anglo-American veteran must be Robert Conquest. He must also be the one who takes the greatest satisfaction in having outlived the Soviet "experiment." Over the years, I have very often knocked respectfully at the door of his modest apartment ("book-lined" would be the other standard word for it) on the outskirts of Stanford University,...

On Monday, December 5, The Wall Street Journal published a major commentary by Robert Conquest, the dean of historians on Soviet tyranny and, for some of us, one of the greatest living moral exemplars in the world. Few authors have written so much and so well on the horrors of Communism. In a column titled "Stalinophilia," Conquest described the case of a minor Italian academic, Luciano Canfora, who has managed to publish a pro-Soviet account of 20th century politics, called in its original tongue "Democracy: History of an Ideology." Canfora's volume has come out in Italy, France, Spain and England....

Until a few days ago I had no idea that there was such a thing as Soviet chic, a fawning nostalgic bow to the land of the Gulag: elegant cocktail party invitations adorned with Red Stars, nightclubs in New York City named Pravda and KGB and decorated with Soviet flags and crowded with hip customers sporting CCCP t-shirts. I had no idea this was going on until Bernadette Malone, a columnist for the Manchester, NH Union-Leader brought Soviet chic to my attention. Ms. Malone rightly views with revulsion the 74 year Soviet "experiment" that slaughtered some 60 million of its...

On Sunday the BBC broadcast a documentary about North Korea, featuring testimony from defectors and refugees. They tell, among other things, about the testing of poison gas on live subjects, including whole families. (In NK, when you are arrested for a political "crime," your whole family is arrested, too. See Kang Chol-hwan's book for details.) Jay Nordlinger brought this to my attention. It's a column by Anne Applebaum in today's Washington Post. As Anne says, it's a pity it had to be the scandal-plagued BBC that broadcast this stuff, as the allegations about torture and poison gas are almost certainly...