Robert Conquest has just died at the age of 98, and the world’s shadows seem a little darker. To declare an interest, he and I have been friends since the days when he was foreign editor of the U.K. Spectator and I was the magazine’s literary editor. One of Bob’s particular bêtes noires was Ezra Pound, whose fascist sympathies and pretentious poetry he disliked in more or less equal proportions. Since the end of the war, Pound had been confined to a hospital in prison-like conditions. A number of poets were pressing for his release on compassionate grounds. Bob would not have it. A poet himself, he had offered to write the very last word on Pound in the literary pages I had just taken over. But when the piece did not arrive, I had to persuade him to devote the weekend to writing it, otherwise the next issue would have blank pages. The secret, I discovered, was to involve Bob in a good political skirmish.
At that time, Bob was engaged in researches for The Great Terror, published in 1968. That book was the first to document the mass murder Joseph Stalin had initiated and supervised in the name of Communism. For three years at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union was a cauldron of denunciation and arbitrary arrest, rigged trials and confessions extracted by torture, and blackmail that ended in deportation to the Gulag or execution. Basing his study on the available primary sources, especially the demographic evidence to be deduced from censuses, Bob calculated that somewhere on the order of 20 million people had been killed.
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