Reflections on a Ravaged Century
by Robert Conquest
Norton. 317 pp. $26.95
The century just past was, by all accounts, the bloodiest in human history. Scholars differ over the precise extent of the carnage, but it seems likely that as many as 80 million people lost their lives in wars and civil wars. An equal number may have perished in deliberate campaigns of mass annihilation, most notably the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet and Chinese Communist slaughters of “class enemies” and “counter-revolutionaries.”
What accounts for these abominations? And what assurance is there that we have seen their last? Robert Conquest, who has spent the better part of his adult life examining one central piece of the gory mosaic of 20th-century history, is uniquely qualified to shed light on these questions.
Born in England on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Conquest is the West’s leading chronicler of its crimes. In The Great Terror (1968), he laid out, in meticulous detail, the brutal mechanics of Stalin’s purges. In The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), he assembled overwhelming evidence that in the early 1930’s, Stalin and his henchmen deliberately engineered massive food shortages in order to crush resistance to collectivization and snuff out potential nationalist opposition to Soviet rule. The resulting famine killed vast numbers of peasants, perhaps as many as eight million in the winter of 1932-33 alone.
For his labors, Conquest has been repaid over the years with every manner of abuse, both from spokesmen for the Soviet regime and, sadly but not surprisingly, from Western academics who, at least while the cold war was still raging, regularly accused him of exaggeration, bias, and worse. The truth, now confirmed by documentary evidence from the former Soviet Union itself, is that Conquest was right on almost every point.
In his latest book, Conquest seeks to place the Soviet experience in the broad perspective of the “ravaged century” that lies behind us. The central theme of these “reflections” is the power of ideas—in particular, the awful destructive potential of grand, abstract, all-encompassing “Ideas.” “The huge catastrophes of our era,” he writes, “have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts,” and central to those thoughts has been “the archaic idea that Utopia can be constructed on earth.” Once seized upon, and elevated to “absolute status,” this vision becomes not a practical “guide to action but an abstraction whose imposition on reality reveals an incompatibility, as engineers say of parts that do not fit and that can only be made to fit by main force.” Again and again, true believers have not hesitated to apply force to the recalcitrant flesh of real human beings.
In illustration, Conquest touches briefly on extremes of nationalism like fascism and Nazism—a fuller accounting of the century’s madness would need to dwell longer on these belief systems and their consequences—but it is Communism, especially in its Soviet variant, that remains his main preoccupation. As he rightly points out, the Soviet case provides “the prime, the longest-lasting, the most globally influential example in modern times of an Idea taking over and bureaucratically enforcing itself in a major country.”
Marxism’s combination of pseudo-scientific language and revolutionary-utopian fantasy helped to win it followers among the small intellectual elite of pre-revolutionary Russia. For Lenin and his minions, Marxism provided
a whole theory of history, and of the universe in general. . . . It divided humanity into irreconcilable sections engaged in a struggle to the death. It guaranteed revolutionary victory, and at the same time insisted on the need to fight for it.
Once these same revolutionaries had seized control of the Russian state, Marxist ideology justified their efforts to annihilate every trace of opposition and guided them in their vast and disastrous experiments in social engineering. In short, the Soviet experience is incomprehensible without an acknowledgement of the mesmeric power of the Communist Idea.
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It is perhaps not so difficult to understand Marxism’s appeal to a motley and desperate crew of turn-of-the-century Russian revolutionaries. But what can explain the “Sovietophilia” that afflicted so many Westerners in the 1930’s and 1940’s and thereafter? The extent and the depth of these perverse sentiments, Conquest writes, will be “incredible to later students of mental aberration.” Yet the facts speak for themselves. For a time, the West was filled (as Arthur Koestler would later write of London) with “thousands of painters and writers and doctors and lawyers and debutantes chanting a diluted version of the Stalinist line.”
What accounts in part for this enthusiasm is a kind of curdled idealism. The belief that capitalism was unjust and that “socialism” would bring an end to injustice led many to conclude that anything furthering the socialist cause was therefore to be supported, “including any amount of injustice” committed in its name. Lack of imagination and experience also played a part, leaving many incapable of conceiving of the horrendous lengths to which human beings were capable of going to achieve their aims. As Conquest writes about Neville Chamberlain’s inability to grasp the challenge posed by Hitler, parochialism of this kind is “not a matter of intelligence, but rather of a knowledge of history, and of evil.”
Conquest pays particular attention to the role of scholars and intellectuals in perpetuating dangerous falsehoods about the Soviet system. Starting with Sidney and Beatrice Webb in the 1930’s, there have always been academics eager to obscure, minimize, or excuse the crimes committed under the banner of socialism. Not only has a “high level of education . . . often failed to protect 20th-century minds from homicidal or suicidal” notions, but “it has often been in colleges and universities that the bad seeds first bore fruit.” Even today, “a surprising number of midlife academics seem to have been trained in, or selected for, susceptibility to dogma.” At the moment, it is true, this weakness cannot be said to pose anything like the danger it once did. Still, if one were searching for bulwarks against future eruptions of ideological extremism, the contemporary college campus would not be a very promising place to start.
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Where, then? Conquest ultimately places his faith in the resilience of the democratic “civic order” that has grown up over the course of three centuries, taking root first in England, then blossoming in America, and finally spreading slowly to other parts of the world. This order is characterized by the rule of law, by firm protections for individual liberty, and by political decisionmaking processes that have become increasingly open and participatory with the passage of time.
But institutions are only part of the story. Even the best-designed mechanisms, if they are not surrounded by a lubricating political culture, will soon grind to a halt. Thus, Conquest writes, the essential feature of civic order—and the one most difficult to reproduce or transplant—is a widely shared acceptance of “the political virtues of free discussion, political compromise, plural societies, piecemeal practicality, change without chaos, and market economics.”
Against the temptations of extremism, then, the best available protection is the “nonideology of moderation.” That is the lesson of the 20th century, a lesson that, in his long and distinguished career, Robert Conquest has done as much as any living writer to teach.
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