The Great Terror. Anmerkungen zum Stalinismus anlässlich des Ablebens von Robert Conquest.

„The absolutely certain way for a defendant to get himself shot was to refuse to plead guilty.”

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror

„In 1997, during an interview with Le Monde, Robert Conquest was asked whether he found the Holocaust ‘worse’ than the Stalinist crimes, he answered: ‘Yes, I did!’, but when the interviewer asked why, he could only answer honestly with ‚I feel so‘. Conquest, anti – Sovietchik number one, feels so. Nabokov, the dispossessed noble, felt so. We feel so. When you read about the war, about the siege of Leningrad – when you read about Stalingrad, about Kursk – your body tells you whose side you are on. You feel so. In attempting to answer the question why, one enters an area saturated with qualms.“

Martin Amis, Koba the Dread

Am 3. August 2015 ist der britisch-amerikanische Historiker, Dichter und Schriftsteller Robert Conquest im Alter von 98 Jahren in seiner Wahlheimat Kalifornien verstorben. Wie der Telegraph in seinem Nachruf schreibt, verkörperte Conquest wie niemand sonst, dass „ es keinen entschlosseneren Antikommunisten als einen Ex-Kommunisten geben kann.“