RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/robert-conquest-human-spirit-c
COMMUNISM AND THE COLD WAR-ON ROBERT CONQUEST- THE BEST HISTORIAN ON THE SUBJECT RSK

Robert Conquest (left) was an extraordinary man in the seamless way he combined his literary with his historical endeavours. He was also a notable public figure in British, European and Western life. I first heard a poem by Robert Conquest when I was thirteen years old and an English master at my school read out the “Excerpt of a Report to the Galactic Council”. So I knew him as a poet many years before I had any idea about the astonishing contribution he made to the analysis of Soviet totalitarianism.

The book that made a worldwide impact for him was The Great Terror, published in 1968. We all now use the term “the Great Terror”. Robert Conquest invented it. It was used only privately in Russia before communism started to collapse. Now it is used generally. Millions of people were killed in 1937 and 1938. Millions of people were also killed, starved or otherwise abused both before and after, but especially in that two-year period of the Great Terror. The euphemism that was applied to it was the period of the cult of the individual. Robert Conquest tore down the veil of preposterous euphemism and called things by their names. His poetry, for all its wonderful refinement, is similar in its determination to use plain words when plain words will do. The basic Conquest interpretation of totalitarianism is one with which I overwhelmingly agree.

That fine book, The Great Terror, was welcomed by people who accepted a fundamental set of ideas. This was that the USSR had invented a one-party, one-ideology terror-based state that poured people into its Gulag labour camps; that it systematically built up propaganda in favour of militant atheism; that it practised legal nihilism—these ideas were fundamental to Robert Conquest’s oeuvre. The remarkable achievement of the book was that it was welcomed by people along the political spectrum from Trotskyists through the middle of Western political life to the further reaches of the political Right.

Robert Conquest was an open-ended writer. You could read him and find out what you wanted for yourself. But when reading him, you could not overlook his essential message that there was something utterly rotten about how the Soviet model had originated and developed in Russia and how it was spread, not just to one or two countries, but to a third of the world in the six decades after the October revolution.

As a public figure, Robert Conquest insisted that something had to be done about removing the communist blight. The result was that whereas he was welcomed for having written The Great Terror, he was shunned and disliked by many who rejected his appeal for action against communism worldwide. He urged that it simply wasn’t right for Western policy to ignore the fate of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the countries to the west of those Baltic States. He declared that a much firmer Western policy was morally and practically desirable. And he pursued this objective throughout his literary and political life, a life which made him a controversial figure.

He is no longer controversial, for the basic reason that most of his ideas now form part of the conventional wisdom. They weren’t greeted in this way at the time when he was first expressing them. He had to stand up for them against a blizzard of criticism.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/11/eternally-ours
On the world’s favorite ruin, occasioned by the publication of The Rome We Have Lost, by John Pemble.

Her inhabitants are allowed to grumble. And so they do: about traffic, trash, politicians, potholes—and tourists. But tourists to Rome have reasons to feel cheerful. For one thing, the very impact of tourism is, in relative terms, not too bad. Unlike Venice or Florence, Rome has been absorbing large numbers of visitors, rich and poor, for over a millennium. And since most secular pilgrims nowadays content themselves with just a few sights—the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Sistine Chapel—many of the city’s absorbing attractions, such as the Palazzo Massimo museum, remain pleasantly unthronged. Further causes for happiness are readily listed according to individual preference. Some find the prevailing palette of civic decor, with its basis of yellow ocher, incomparably soothing to the eye. Others will applaud the proliferation of vendors specializing in artisanal ice cream, or the fact that even in the centro storico one can get a genuine cappuccino at a bar for little more than a euro. Capitals elsewhere vaunt more vertiginous architectural drama. But Wordsworth begs to be corrected. In terms of an urban panorama, surely earth has not anything to show so fair as Rome’s skyline viewed from the terrace of the Capitoline Museums.

And yet there is no place like Rome for inducing melancholia. Psychologically, to those who immerse themselves in it, the city is depressing. Sigmund Freud—who immersed himself repeatedly—noted that effect without diagnosing the cause. It may have perplexed him, since he also recognized the contentment of exploring ancient ruins—a return (of course) to the bourn of a maternal embrace. Rome is always feminine, thus the eternal mother. Yet eternity unsettles us. If only the city would crumble. If only it would obey the laws of vegetable growth and decay, or else have the decency to fossilize like Troy and Nineveh. If only Rome were to match those other great cities of Classical antiquity, Athens and Alexandria, and fashion of its past glory a definable museum. Then we might take some comfort from observing the limits of longevity. But Rome resists those expectations. Mere mortals may strut along the Corso now. Soon enough they must stagger, then collapse. The street has seen it all before, and will see it all again. So this city, unlike any other, tells us that our lives are carved in water.