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Archives

Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3

Notes for expansion of article

A 1979 collection of essays by Conquest, The Abomination of Moab is mentioned here. Seems to be at least partially about art criticism, thus not appropriate for listing in the existing bibliography in our article, labelled "Historical works".
Article also mentions that Conquest "also doubles as a poet and literary critic", two aspects of hs career not mentioned in our article as far as I can tell.
-- Writtenonsand (talk) 19:55, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Needs cleanup for neutrality and weasel problems

Article needs cleanup to remove formulations such as

• "That a known Communist should have been allowed to join the intelligence service seems extraordinary in retrospect"
• "the Army seems to have taken the view that"
• "Conquest's time with the IRD has sparked some controversy, becoming a favorite topic of many critics"
• "Generally, these assertions are viewed with skepticism by other historians"
• "The most important aspect of the book was ..."
• "Some communists continue to deny the claims made in The Great Terror ..."
• "In an attempt to discredit Conquest's work, communist writers accuse him of relying on 'Nazi collaborators, émigrés, and the CIA'"
• "Conquest's most recent works ... may be seen as his summation of his career."

See WP:NPOV, WP:WEASEL -- Writtenonsand (talk) 20:16, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Hagiography not biography

This really is a terribly biased piece. Conquest has been widely criticised by historians (not, as this claims, simply by Communists) for - to name a few criticisms - adopting an ideological position towards the USSR that has coloured his conclusions beyond acceptability, for ignoring source material contradicting his arguments and for being too concerned with high politics. 87.127.137.165 (talk) 15:15, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

OK. As an exercise: who has made these criticisms? Where and when were they made? What, specifically, do they say? Sourced and notable criticism does belong in this article. Please bring some specific sources making the criticisms you mention, and propose text for how they should be incorporated. MastCell  17:25, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough demands, but Misplaced Pages should really be setting the anon user a better another example here. The article is full of claims about what "most historians", or some variant of the phrase, think - which I suspect are not simply weasel-worded but are false. Kalkin (talk) 04:36, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed that these should be cited and attributed, as should criticism. MastCell  17:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree and removed some of the most contentious and completely unsourced garbage. Remember, this is a BLP. If someone wants to place this back, please provide reliable sources.Biophys (talk) 19:09, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Mark Tauger is the leading researcher on the causes of the famine of 1932-3 as having been plant rust. Tauger does thoroughly debunk Conquest's version of a "manmade famine" as something which Conquest portrayed as having been caused by grain exports amidst a purportedly plentiful crop. The famine was caused by actual crop failure, and then aggravated by the failure to understand this and to realize the need for massize imports of grain. The significance of those reduced exports which did take place is that they reflect the failure to realize the crisis, but they are not at all sufficient to account for the famine itself. It's also been established that Conquest and others frequently inflated the number of deaths in the famine by several million. A more detailed analysis of the famine toll in the Ukraine is given in POPULATION STUDIES, November 2002. Conquest and Mace had popularized a "seven million Ukrainians" number as a Cold War counterpart to "six million Jews" from WWII fame, but actual Ukrainian deaths are more like 2.5 million with a couple extra non-Ukrainians dying as well. Apart from the specifics of the famine of 1932-3, there is nothing to support the type of 10+ million numbers which Conquest throws around. Archibald Getty has done the most thorough analysis of the purges of the 1930s and estimates the total numbers of dead from either execution or labor camp deprivement as approximately 1.5 million over the whole decade of the 1930s. Getty & Naumov's (THE ROAD TO TERROR) scale is consistent with Khlevnuik's numbers (A HISTORY OF THE GULAG) in a book for which Conquest wrote the introduction. General demographic studies have been done and much of this data is published in Haynes & Husan, A CENTURY OF STATE MURDER? The overall picture of Soviet mortality figures which shows through in these statistics is woefully inconsistent with Conquest's claim of "20 million." Mortality in 1937 was well below what it had been at any time in the Czarist era. That doesn't make up for innocents killed in the purges, but one can't support claims such as "20 million" when the main demographic tables do not at all match with such claims. They show a broad tendency towards improvement of the peacetime conditions of the Soviet population, in spite of brutalities in the Gulag and Lubyanka. Conquest's "20 million" is pure fiction. Anyway, these are actual source references based on data taken straight from the Soviet archives. Anyone who wishes to examine the matter further can simply begin following these leads. Conquest is a lying hoaxer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.86.226.32 (talk) 14:17, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Some of these references are not very well sourced, some are excellent - certainly better than Conquest's figures. Certainly the Ukrainian death toll and its explanation are generally refuted among historians (partly because of the forged pictures in the book). Overall, it is an extremely apologetic article of a pretty lowly rated historian and highly rated propagandist.--Redjsteel (talk) 00:56, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

The fact that Holodomor was man-made was revealed even in Perestroika era Soviet sources. Leonid Kravchuk, then a communist functionary, came to the same conclusion around 1989 (read his quote here). Kravchuk specifically says he was considering drought as a reason but this was not consistent with facts. Lokalkosmopolit (talk) 20:59, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Ever since I rewrote this article years ago, people have been regularly asserting on this Talk page that Conquest's claims about both the Purges and the Collectivisation Famine have been disproved by various historians. Yet no sustainable changes to the article have been made, because no evidence to support this contention has been produced. If anyone can produce a sourced quotation from a reputable historian who asserts that Conquest was wrong on any significant point, let them do so, and of course it should go in the article. But mere assertions that Conquest was wrong won't do. Intelligent Mr Toad (talk) 07:34, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Article's reference to supposed corrections to Conquest's work is excessively vague

"After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed, unedited information has been released that contest Conquest's claims heavily."

Sorry, folks, this is just too vague, even if accompanied by a couple of references. What is he supposed to have got wrong, and what is the evidence suggesting that he did so? (The paragraph that follows in the article does not address these issues, being about alternative interpretations of how Stalin's crimes relate to Lenin and so on). Nandt1 (talk) 13:40, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Removed.Biophys (talk) 21:18, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Conquest's Laws of Politics?

Nothing about Conquest's Laws of Politics? What a huge omission. 75.72.44.227 (talk) 15:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Some googling shows a lot of confusion about the law or laws. The Three Laws of Politics appear to be these:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

alternatively:

1. Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

and:

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

I can find a number of references to these online. But I cannot find any authoritative citation to where they are from. The first appears to be Conquest's, and coined first, perhaps in response to critics of The Great Terror. It seems that John O'Sullivan may have coined the second law. And the third seems to be Conquest's, but coined much after the first, perhaps in Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
Leonard (talk) 18:55, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

External links

I have just Wikified the section External links. From the formatting, these look to have been cut & pasted from somewhere else. Unfortunately the links were not copied (except for a couple), resulting in a bunch of External links with no links. I have left each entry in the hope that another editor will guess from where they were cut & pasted, and add in the links. The alternative is to delete those with no links. HairyWombat 01:36, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

They were cut-and-pasted from an old version of the article after they were accidentally deleted - here. I've restored the old section. Shimgray | talk | 06:43, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

That looks a lot better. However, there are too many. Things like his biog at Hoover, and profiles at Stanford and Sparticus belong as <ref>s, not external links, but I will leave it to somebody else to clean this up. (I have no particular interest in this topic.) HairyWombat 19:17, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Recent edits

Here is text in question. Please quote the source (which appears in the end of text) to show that it actually supports assertions made in the text. Thanks, My very best wishes (talk) 21:09, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Here: This data convinced Robert Conquest that the thesis about a genocidal famine must have been wrong. -YMB29 (talk) 21:16, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Here we are talking about retraction. This is serious matter. The retractions are openly done by author by publishing in a widely accessible source. To my knowledge, Robert Conquest never done this with respect to Soviet terror-famine (if you could provide ref to his own official retraction, that would be a proof that retraction was made. This book refers to unpublished letter. Therefore, I think this should be removed, especially in a BLP. My very best wishes (talk) 21:42, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

This retraction is good enough. If the authors published a private letter without Conquest's permission, he could of sued them.

Anyway, the source cited clearly says that he dismissed his own view, so your opinion on whether this is true or not does not matter since we go by what the sources says. -YMB29 (talk) 23:21, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Regarding the paragraph eliminated by MastCell: 18:27, 16 September 2015‎ MastCell (talk | contribs)‎ . . (28,718 bytes) (-1,654)‎ . . (→‎The Great Terror: sorry, no - the reference does not support your text; the fact that one historian from a rival school of thought disagrees with conquest does not mean that his work is categorically considered invalid by "scientific" historians (sic) I understand what you are pointing out, I should find references that back up my text: "in the field of scientific historical reasearch Conquest's work is now considered outdated and obsolete and no longer cited in the most important works of the last years about USSR history as it was before", I then will be able to re-add the paragraph. Beside that I can tell you that what I wrote is right: in the greatest majority of the works of the last 3 decades Conquest's work is no longer cited as a reliable source on actual facts, he is cited solely about historiography on USSR, but of course I cannot make a list of works of different historians' works which back up what I wrote as a source/reference, citing their bibliography missing Conquest's book as an example. And I guess it's useful to say that most of these historians are not rampage communist, instead are all quite anti-USSR and only give more accurate numbers and reports on what happened in those years with actual archival sources and on. Moreover Hobsbawm is considered one of the greatest historians of the last century, and nobody in universities around the world will put in doubt his scientifical approach and consider his political beliefs as a reason to disprove his work (unless for political reasons of course, which are anyway alien to serious historical reasearch and history in general). That's why in turn, to label him simply as a "rival" of a different school (which is not, we are not talking about an exponent of the so-called 'Revisionist school' on USSR historiography which born in the '80s) is what really look ludicrous and it appears to be written really only for political reason (which again, are extraneous to serious historical research). Here is what most people (which, of course, are not historians) don't understand: there is a difference between 'scientifical' and 'popular' history. Hobsbawm belong to the former, while Conquest belong to the latter field, and in the academic environment this is well known (which of course does not make his works unusable, again on a history about USSR historiography or about "cultural Cold War" would be greatly useful). Maybe should be remembered that while Hobsbawm books are adopted as text course by Contemporary History university professors all around the world (again, for their undisputed scientifical approach) not the same can be said for Robert Conquest's books, and moreover should be remembered that Hobsbawm does not disagree at all with Conquest. As written by him in the paragraph now cancelled: "pratically all the life of the USSR much was inaccessible,hidden behind barricades of official lies and half-truths" and "Conquest will be read as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror" . Are these statement making Hobsbawm an opponent of Conquest? Is Hobsbawm denying what happened in USSR during those years? Is Hobsbawm denying the "Stalin Terror"? No, simply Hobsbawm is saying that because archival sources were not available, Conquest's work could be only based on fragmentary sources and guesswork (which it is, everybody reading it can see it) then, beside his pioneer effort, from now on, historians will have available better and more complete data and 'The Great Terror' will drop out of sight, which in fact is what happened. So for the moment, for luck of references to cite, I will put what written by Hobsbawm in the section criticism on the page 'The Great Terror', hoping that most of the wiki users will understand the difference between politics and history. (Flushout1999 (talk) 19:53, 16 September 2015 (UTC))

American ?

Did Conquest ever obtain American citizenship? Is it correct to describe him as American? --Racklever (talk) 07:14, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

He seems to have been born and raised in England but his father was a gringo. Not sure what that makes him. OrganicEarth (talk) 17:31, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Well the question is, did he have American citizenship? --81.157.182.65 (talk) 22:20, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Parents

Here's a wedding announcement for his parents: link. OrganicEarth (talk) 17:25, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

POV and Call for Revision: October 9, 2015

Negative Point of View

This article seems to have a decidedly negative point of view (POV).

Examples:

• "Obession": lead sentence to Paragraph 2

• • Non-sequitur: It does not fit following two sentences and is clearly an add-on.
  • Biased source: It states: "The Soviet Union was Conquest's lifetime obsession." The reference cites American journalist Jeff Coplon, who wiki entry states: "In a controversial 1988 article in The Village Voice, Coplon analyzed the scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, and argued that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Sovietologist Robert Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community. In a letter to the editors, Robert Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity."
  • Biased rationale: Lifetime expertise does not constitute obsession.
  • Remedy: A more neutral observation could start by noting something like "Conquest spent the majority of his 98 years in the study of Bolshevik Communism..."

• "Not merely": lead sentence in Paragraph 3
  • Overstated: Conquest was not merely an “anti-Stalinist,” but an anti-Communist, period: in Russia, in Vietnam, in Europe, in the Caribbean — everywhere." While no numbers or research comes to mind that readily supports the following statement, it seems typical that an anti-Stalinist also but an anti-Communist and also anti-Liberal -- thus, this sounds overstated.
  • Remedy: Tone down lead sentence to read: "Conquest was an anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist."

• "Mental addiction" final sentence in Paragraph 3
  • Overstated: He also called Marxism a “misleading mental addiction”.
  • Remedy: Demote by keeping but within parenthesese

• "Anti-Sovietchik number one": Paragraph 4
  • Overstated: while an interesting note (which no doubt the anti-Stalinist, anti-Communist Coquest would have relished), this is more of an historical note that should appear below in terms of either Conquest's impact or legacy.
  • Remedy: Create "legacy" sub-section below and add this paragraph.

General Review:

It seems at least one person with fairly strong antipathy toward Conquest has recently been seeding this entry with negative comments. The entry now needs revision and restructuring.

It also needs better writing than starting any sentence like this: "Anyway, in 1996, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who have been previously attacked by Conquest for his book Age of Extremes, while praising Conquest's The Great Terror "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror", expressed the opinion that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available", thus there was not need any more for "using fragmentary sources" and "guesswork" as "when better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones"... Too long, and who starts any sentence in an encyclopedic article with the colloquial "anyway"?

Conclusion Conquest may have been an historian with strong opinions and decidedly "edgy" (and sometimes outright vulgar and prejudiced) poetry. Nevertheless, contributors need to add factual claims, not viewpoints, and make statements with relative neutrality and with credible citations.

Respectfully --Aboudaqn (talk) 22:55, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Now paragraphs at the beginning clearly state who are the authors of the quoted sentences: one is Coplon who does not support Conquest, one is an article on National Review which is strongly supportive of Conquest, then we have quotes by Conquest and more supportive citations praising Conquest. I'm sorry but, where is all this negativity about Conquest at the article's beginning? Would it be more correct to use exclusively sources which are positive on Conquest? Then the article would have become a piece of agiography! (And only Coplon at the beginning of the article is negative on Conquest! It's only one sentence!) I thought was better to keep balance and also add Coplon.

Second, all paragraphs I'm adding, they have all a reliable source, which is clearly referenced and everybody can check them: Telegraph, Guardian, National Review, Los Angel Times, NY Times, Conquest's books, scholars' articles, other historians' books on the same topics (which directly involved and cited Conquest's work, otherwise there is no point to cite them, would become OR). Are these not "credible" sources?

Most of the newspapers articles contains actual quotes by Conquest himself, which are now correctly reported in this article with quotation marks, as they are actually sentences pronounced by Conquest himself during his life. These quotes are Conquest's quotes, they are facts of his life, not opinions.

Also, for what reason Coplon should be considered a biased source? Only because there was a controversy on his most famous article? Then, following this path, all of the Conquest's production could be regarded as biased as all of his books went highly controversial in the academical and political field.

So here it is, as users we have to write a balanced point of view on whatever this man did in his life, so we have to write both negative and positive anecdotes and episodes, positive and negative on what he did and thought, positive and negative about his legacy and work. We cannot pickup only what we think is more suitable to our prejudices, this is why I am using all available (and reliable) sources from the net and on paper.

Problem is: virtually nothing of Conquest's works and actions was quite balanced, here is why article does not seem neutral. But if even the most supportive fans call him "an anti-communist, period - everywhere", if he was the one to say "USSR was the problem of humanity", Marxism was a "mental addiction", Russian are "martians", if he was the one to write books to advise Americans of the "Russian danger", what should we do about it? Hide our head under the sand, because that seems not "neutral"? That's what he was doing, those are facts, not opinions, they were, in fact, his opinions! All of these opinions were part of his work (as remembered by all his friend and collaborators, again, everybody can check the sources cited in the article) and life, and they need to be cited in an article that is his biography.

The real fact here is that Conquest, on the political and historical field, never wanted to look neutral. For example he said with pride he was a "Cold Warrior". To not state correctly his real thoughts in the wiki article, would be in fact to betray the person he was in life, whether one could agree or not with his political beliefs. Probably I could use less quotation marks but I prefer to stick up to the original source most that I can, just cause I believe original quote must not be betrayed in sense and meaning.

Respectfully --(Flushout1999 (talk) 15:43, 14 October 2015 (UTC))

I think the original poster is on to something, and it's not all that subtle. Flushout1999 is clearly here with an agenda: to discredit Conquest and his work. That's clear from the cherry-picking of sources, the presentation of rival historians' arguments as if they were gospel, and the editorial language that Flushout1999 inserts into the article. Flushout1999 is assembling a case against Conquest, rather than writing anything that looks remotely like an encyclopedia article. It's textbook tendentious editing, but given how poorly Misplaced Pages is set up to deal with such editing, I don't feel motivated to sink the time and effort needed to deal with it. MastCell  22:57, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

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