Robert Conquest obituary

Historian and poet who exposed the full extent of Stalin’s terror during the Soviet era

Robert Conquest was a former communist who became a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/NP Pictures

Eric Homberger

Wednesday 5 August 2015  The Guardian

Among the western historians of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, who has died aged 98, had a unique place. In 1989-90 his account of the terror of the 1930s was translated and published in a Soviet journal. At the same time, a half-dozen other Soviet journals were publishing translated material from Conquest’s other books. He was not the first to describe the extent and workings of the Stalin tyranny, but he did so in fine detail. He had become, for a broad Russian readership, the man who told the truth about the terror, and Stalin’s murderous tyranny.
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