mikegriffith1
Mike Griffith
British historian Robert Conquest calculated that Stalin's collectivization and purges killed between 13 and 15 million Soviet citizens between 1930 and 1953.
Western scholars said this was absurd. The consensus estimate was 2 to 3 million deaths, most from "unfortunate policy mistakes" rather than deliberate murder.
Conquest's crime? He did the math. He compared Soviet census data from 1926, 1937, and 1939. Millions of people had simply vanished from official records.
In The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest documented the Holodomor, Stalin's engineered famine in Ukraine that killed between 3 and 7 million people in 1932-33.
Soviet officials seized grain at gunpoint. They banned travel from affected regions. They denied international food aid. Villages were left to starve while grain sat in government warehouses or got exported for foreign currency.
The New York Times' Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty called reports of famine "malignant propaganda." He won a Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet coverage.
Conquest called it genocide. And he was professionally isolated for saying so.
In the 1990s, Soviet archives became accessible to researchers. Conquest's estimates were vindicated almost exactly.
Some figures were even worse than he predicted. The NKVD execution lists, the deportation records, the famine mortality data, it all confirmed what he'd pieced together from fragments decades earlier.
Why leftist academics refuse to believe Conquest?
Because acknowledging Conquest meant admitting the entire progressive intellectual project of the 20th century had defended mass murder.
It meant Harvard professors had praised a system that killed millions. It meant "useful idiots" had provided cover for industrial-scale atrocity. It meant campus radicals had romanticized totalitarianism.
Western scholars said this was absurd. The consensus estimate was 2 to 3 million deaths, most from "unfortunate policy mistakes" rather than deliberate murder.
Conquest's crime? He did the math. He compared Soviet census data from 1926, 1937, and 1939. Millions of people had simply vanished from official records.
In The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest documented the Holodomor, Stalin's engineered famine in Ukraine that killed between 3 and 7 million people in 1932-33.
Soviet officials seized grain at gunpoint. They banned travel from affected regions. They denied international food aid. Villages were left to starve while grain sat in government warehouses or got exported for foreign currency.
The New York Times' Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty called reports of famine "malignant propaganda." He won a Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet coverage.
Conquest called it genocide. And he was professionally isolated for saying so.
In the 1990s, Soviet archives became accessible to researchers. Conquest's estimates were vindicated almost exactly.
Some figures were even worse than he predicted. The NKVD execution lists, the deportation records, the famine mortality data, it all confirmed what he'd pieced together from fragments decades earlier.
Why leftist academics refuse to believe Conquest?
Because acknowledging Conquest meant admitting the entire progressive intellectual project of the 20th century had defended mass murder.
It meant Harvard professors had praised a system that killed millions. It meant "useful idiots" had provided cover for industrial-scale atrocity. It meant campus radicals had romanticized totalitarianism.
