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Tag Archives: Robert Conquest

Our Next Series of Demands

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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American History, Averell Harriman, Capitalism, Communism, Diplomacy, Government, history, Joseph Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Paul Johnson, peace, politics, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Robert Conquest, Russia, Soviet Union, War, World War Two, Yalta Conference

World Leaders at the Yalta Conference, 1945

“In November 1945 Maxim Litvinov, at that time Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR (who, as his wife told me, had become not merely tactically but even ideologically disenchanted), was asked by the American envoy Averell Harriman what the West could do to satisfy Stalin. He answered: ‘Nothing.’ In June 1946, still in that post, he warned a Western journalist that the ‘root cause’ of the confrontation was ‘the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable’ — that is, no more than the doctrine long since announced by Lenin that ‘a series of frightful clashes’ were bound to occur between the two systems, leading finally to the world victory of communism. When the correspondent asked Litvinov, ‘Suppose the West would suddenly give in and grant all Moscow’s demands?… would that lead to goodwill and the easing of the present tension?’ Litvinov answered, ‘It would lead to you being faced, after a more or less short time, with our next series of demands.'”

__________

Excerpted from Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. In the book, Conquest, who Paul Johnson calls “our greatest living historian,” offers a blistering critique of not just Marx and his acolytes, but of the more general tendency for human beings to believe too strongly in the redemptive power of radical ideas and institutions.

On another level, in reading Litvinov’s ominous response, I was struck not by its application to today’s Russia (though some may argue that), but by how it reflects the unspoken approaches of so many groups and movements, both internal and external.

The photograph was taken at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Harriman is in the background, second from the right.

There’s more:

  • Why Stalin hated Trotsky
  • How today’s Britain, Germany, and France have reconciled their roles in World War II
  • The Nightmarish Child: Vladimir Lenin’s last days

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The Nightmarish Child

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Adam Ulam, Alexander Lenin, Communism, Dmitri Volkogonov, Intellectuals, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Krupskaya Lenin, Lenin: A New Biography, Leninism, Purges, Robert Conquest, Russia, Russian History, Russian Revolution, Soviet Union, The Harvest of Sorrow, Tsar Alexander III, Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

“Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky.* In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin’s doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36. . . . The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography:

He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls… The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.

There were further strokes. Later, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya taught him to repeat (and it only worked under direct prompting) the words ‘peasant,’ ‘worker,’ ‘people,’ and ‘revolution’ . . . Adam Ulam has described the nihilism of the Russian revolutionary tradition as ‘at once childish and nightmarish.’ The dying Lenin — and, frequently, the living Lenin, too — was childish and nightmarish. In his last ten months he was reduced to monosyllables. But at least they were political monosyllables: vot-vot (here-here) and sezd-sezd (congress-congress)…

In March 1887 Lenin’s older brother Alexander was arrested for conspiring to murder his namesake, Tsar Alexander III; a plea for clemency would have reduced his sentence to hard labor, but Alexander was possessed of the courage of youth and, two months later, was duly hanged. He was twenty-one. Vladimir Ilyich was seventeen. And their father died the previous year. Clearly the consequences of these events are entitled to be boundless. My sense of it is that Lenin’s moral faculties stopped developing thereafter. Hence his foulmouthed tantrums, his studied amorality, his flirtatious nihilism, his positively giggly response to violence: his nightmarish childishness.”

__________

Excerpted from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.

I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of this dark but illuminating book. On a sunnier (or at least funnier) note, there’s some light verse that’s unavoidable here, penned as it was by Robert Conquest, the renowned historian of the Soviet Union and family friend of Amis:

There once was a bastard called Lenin
Who did one or two million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

To take you back into the shade: in introducing his compendious study of the 1929 Soviet terror-famine, The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest offers the reader the following proem:

“We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

That single sentence stands for 3,040 lives. His book runs 417 pages.

*“The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit.”

More on Russia:

  • Anne Applebaum describes Putin’s eerie connection to the ancien régime
  • A. N. Wilson lays out just how much the Soviets sacrificed to beat the Nazis
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s incisive Nobel speech about the nature of man

Vladimir Lenin

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The Seven Ages of Man

04 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, Speeches

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

As You Like It, Lenin, poetry, Robert Conquest, Seven Ages of Man, Shakespeare, Stalin, William Shakespeare, Writing

William ShakespeareAll the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

____

The renowned British historian Robert Conquest took this famous stave and reshaped it into limerick form, distilling man’s seven ages into five lines…

   Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps’ rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

__________

Two versions of man’s “seven ages,” once from Shakespeare’s As You Like Itand the other from the great Robert Conquest.

My friend M. likes to throw out — usually at the tail end of some long, drawn-out, boozy dinner — another of Conquest’s coarse verse:

There once was a bastard called Lenin
Who did one or two million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Not bad for the author of The Great Terror and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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