Conquest, Robert

Autor: Conquest, Robert
Rok: 1917-2015
Oblast působnosti: historici, spisovatelé

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Anglický historik, spisovatel, básník a editor.
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG, OBE, FBA, FAAAS, FRSL, FBIS (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British-American historian and poet, notable for his influential works on Soviet history including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968). He was a longtime research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.The Soviet Union was Conquest's lifetime obsession. In the early 1990s, Richard Nixon said, “[Conquest's] historical courage makes him partially responsible for the death of Communism.”Conquest was not merely an “anti-Stalinist,” but an anti-Communist, period: in Russia, in Vietnam, in Europe, in the Caribbean — everywhere.He maintained throughout his career that the core problem with the USSR began with Marxism as a mode of political economy, which he considered fraudulent and discredited. He affirmed: "The mere existence of the U.S.S.R., and its ideas, distorted the way in which many people over the whole world thought about society, the economy, human history".He was denounced in 1990 at the very last plenum of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party by Alexander Chakovsky as “anti-Sovietchik number one” emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”.