Robert Conquest was the historian, poet, etc., who lived almost 100 years — from 1917 to 2015. One of his books is Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Another of his books is Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Vladimir Putin is trying to break Ukraine right now. Will he succeed?
Stalin had many supporters in the West, i.e., the Free World. So does Putin. There will always be supporters, fellow travelers, useful idiots. Always. Sometimes they come from the left, sometimes they come from the right. But they come.
In 1968, Conquest published his classic The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. A revised version of the book came out in 1990, after Soviet archives opened up. In 1986, Conquest published another classic, The Harvest of Sorrow, which is about the terror-famine in Ukraine, inflicted by the Kremlin. I first laid eyes on Bob when he came to campus — in either ’86 or ’87 — to discuss that book. He later became a friend, a stroke of luck for me.
Another stroke of luck is to know his wife, Elizabeth. I heard from her after I wrote a piece on Kateryna Yushchenko, a former first lady of Ukraine. (Her husband, Viktor, was almost murdered in a poison attack — the kind of attack for which Putin’s agents are infamous.) It was Mrs. Yushchenko, said Mrs. Conquest, who saw to it that The Harvest of Sorrow and The Great Terror, both, were made available in Ukrainian schools. Bob waived all royalties. Translation into Ukrainian was assisted by the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.
Obviously, the work of Robert Conquest meant a lot to patriotic Ukrainians, and still does. The work of Anne Applebaum means a lot to them too. In 2005, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States traveled to Stanford, in California, to present Bob with a medal: the Order of Yaroslav Mudry.
Also in 2005, George W. Bush bestowed on Bob the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He did it on November 9, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. You can tell a lot about a president by the Medals of Freedom he bestows. (I have written on this subject in the past — here, for example.) Another GWB recipient was Natan Sharansky. Another was Óscar Biscet — a Cuban who, at the time, was a political prisoner. Bush was hoping the medal would help keep him alive.
Robert Conquest is no longer here, but he is here in spirit, and his books live on, and I trust we will always have other people, pursuing this same kind of work: uncovering the truth, however popular or unpopular, and pressing for freedom against its many and assorted enemies.