Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest , CMG , OBE , FBA , FAAAS , FRSL , FBIS ( born 15 July 1917 ) , known best as Robert Conquest , is an Anglo - American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include " The Great Terror : Stalin ’ s Purges of the 1930s " ( 1968 , 4th ed . , 2008 ) . He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University ' s Hoover Institution . Biography . Early career . Conquest was born in Great Malvern , Worcestershire , to an American of independent means and an English mother . His father served in an American Ambulance Service unit with the French Army in World War I , being awarded the Croix de Guerre , with Silver Star in 1916 . Conquest was educated at Winchester College , the University of Grenoble , and Magdalen College , Oxford , where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor ' s and master ' s degrees in Philosophy , Politics and Economics , and his doctorate in Soviet history . In 1937 , after studying at the University of Grenoble , Conquest went up to Oxford , joining both the Carlton Club and , as an " open " member , the Communist Party of Great Britain . Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee . When World War II broke out , Conquest joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry . In 1942 , he married Joan Watkins , with whom he had two sons . In 1943 , he was posted to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies , where he studied Bulgarian for four months . In 1944 , Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command , attached to the Third Ukrainian Front , and then to the Allied Control Commission . There , he met Tatiana Mihailova , who later became his second wife . At the end of the war , he joined the Foreign Office , returning to the British Legation in Sofia . Witnessing first - hand the communist takeover in Bulgaria , he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas . He left Bulgaria in 1948 , helping Tatiana escape the new regime . Back in London , he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana . In 1951 , Tatiana Conquest was diagnosed with schizophrenia , and after many years , in 1962 the couple divorced . Conquest joined the Foreign Office ' s Information Research Department ( IRD ) , a unit created by the Labour government to " collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings , to disseminate it to friendly journalists , politicians , and trade unionists , and to support , financially and otherwise , anticommunist publications . " In 1950 he served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations . In 1956 , Conquest left the IRD , later becoming a freelance writer and historian . During the 1960s , Conquest edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD , published in London by the Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series ; and in the United States republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by Frederick Praeger , whose U . S . company published , in addition to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , Milovan Đilas , Howard Fast , and Charles Patrick Fitzgerald , a number of books on communism . In 1962 – 63 , Conquest was literary editor of " The Spectator " , but resigned when he found it interfered with his historical writing . His first books on the Soviet Union were " Common Sense About Russia " ( 1960 ) , " The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities " ( 1960 ) and " Power and Policy in the USSR " ( 1961 ) . His other early works on the Soviet Union included " Courage of Genius : The Pasternak Affair " ( 1961 ) and " Russia After Khrushchev " ( 1965 ) . The Great Terror . In 1968 , Conquest published what became his best - known work , " The Great Terror : Stalin ' s Purge of the Thirties " , the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge , which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939 . The book was based mainly on information which had been made public , either officially or by individuals , during the so - called " Khrushchev Thaw " in the period 1956 – 64 . It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s , and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census . The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the " Moscow trials " of disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev , who were executed after summary show trials . The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers , and had underlain books such as George Orwell ' s " Nineteen Eighty - Four " and Arthur Koestler ' s " Darkness at Noon " . Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges . By his estimates , Stalinist famines and purges had led to the deaths of 20 million people . He later stated that the total number of deaths could " hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million . " Conquest criticized western intellectual s for " blindness " with respect to the Soviet Union , and argued that Stalinism was a logical consequence of Marxism - Leninism , rather than an aberration from " true " communism . Conquest did not accept the assertion made by Nikita Khrushchev , and supported by many Western leftists , that Joseph Stalin and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the " revolution " and were contrary to the principles of Leninism . Conquest argued that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin , although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s . Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb , George Bernard Shaw , Jean - Paul Sartre , Walter Duranty , Sir Bernard Pares , Harold Laski , D . N . Pritt , Theodore Dreiser , Bertold Brecht and Romain Rolland for being dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime , citing various comments they had made denying , excusing , or justifying various aspects of the purges . After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991 , detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions . When Conquest ' s publisher asked him to expand and revise " The Great Terror " , Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled " I Told You So , You Fucking Fools . " In fact , the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest ' s old friend , Sir Kingsley Amis . The new version was published in 1990 as " The Great Terror : A Reassessment " ; ISBN 0 - 19 - 507132 - 8 . Some critics claim that examinations of archives following the USSR ' s collapse in 1991 challenge many of Conquest ' s statements . Although some aspects of his work continue to be disputed by those on the left , according to poet Czeslaw Milosz he has been vindicated by history . Michael Ignatieff wrote " One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated . Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure . " Later works . In 1986 , Conquest published " The Harvest of Sorrow : Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror - Famine " , dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR , under Stalin ' s direction in 1929 – 31 , and the resulting famine , in which millions of peasants died due to starvation , deportation to labor camp s , and execution . In this book , Conquest was even more critical of western left - wing intellectuals than he had been in " The Great Terror " . He accused them of denying the full scale of the famine , attacking their views as " " an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale . " " He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s , and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one : " " Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one ? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms . To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists , and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented , is not a rational act . " " Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide . However , information that became available later convinced Conquest that was wrong and he dismissed his concept of a terror - famine . Poetry . In addition to his scholarly work , Conquest is a well - regarded poet whose poems have been published in various periodicals from 1937 . In 1945 he was awarded the PEN Brazil Prize for his war poem " For the Death of a Poet " — about an army friend , the poet Drummond Allison , killed in Italy — and , in 1951 , he received a Festival of Britain verse prize . Since then he has brought out seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism . A major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as " The Movement " — which also included Philip Larkin and Sir Kingsley Amis — Conquest edited , in 1956 and 1962 , the influential " New Lines " anthologies , introducing works by them , as well as Thom Gunn , Dennis Enright , and others , to a wider public . He spent 1959 - 60 as visiting poet at the University of Buffalo . Several of his poems were published in " The New Oxford Book of Light Verse " ( 1978 ; compiled by Amis ) , under the pseudonyms " Stuart Howard - Jones " , " Victor Gray " and " Ted Pauker " . Soon after expulsion from the Soviet Union , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn met with Conquest , asking him to translate a ‘ little ’ poem of his into English verse . This was " Prussian Nights " — nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre — published in 1977 . Conquest has published two novels : one of science fiction , " A World of Difference " ( 1955 ) , and , co - authored with Amis , " The Egyptologists " ( 1965 ) . Later life . In 1964 , he married Caroleen MacFarlane ; this marriage was dissolved in 1978 . In 1979 , he married Elizabeth Neece Wingate , a lecturer in English and the daughter of a United States Air Force colonel . In 1981 , Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar - Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University ’ s Hoover Institution , where he remains a Fellow . He has numerous grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter . Conquest has been a fellow of the Columbia University ' s Russian Institute , and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars ; a distinguished visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation ; a research associate of Harvard University ' s Ukrainian Research Institute ; and the presenter of Granada Television ' s seven - part mini - series documentary on the Soviet Union , " Red Empire " ( 1990 ) . Awards and honors . Conquest is a dual national ( British and American ) by birth . He is a Fellow of the British Academy , of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , of the Royal Society of Literature , and of the British Interplanetary Society , and a Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies . His honors include His awards include :