#robert conquest

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For Conquest, the Soviet Union’s otherness was absolute, and the Great Purges best seen through a prism of science fiction. Stalin as purger-in-chief did not have the ring of ‘a modern man, a terrestrial man, an earth man’, Conquest once said: ‘He sounds like a monster from some strange planet. I’ve written a science fiction novel amongst my various writings … and I think Stalin would fit in very well as a nonhuman.’ This worked not just for Stalin but for the Soviet Union in general, Conquest argued: ‘A science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn’t so much whether they’re good or bad, exactly; they’re not bad or good as we’d be bad or good. It’s far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us.’

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews ‘The Great Terror’ by Robert Conquest and ‘The Harvest of Sorrow’ by Robert Conquest · LRB 24 January 2019

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TOO LATE

The Three Laws Robert Conquest the British-American historian of the Soviet Union had considerable insight into the workings of political bureaucracy. Although probably misattributed, what have become known as Conquest’s Three Laws are still instructive when we consider how organisations work, and more importantly how they fail. The Three Laws are generally understood as: 1.        Everyone is…

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[nycreligion]

Killed, Pentecostals in Ukraine with church roots in NYC

Yaroslav Pavenko. Photo: Ukrainian Pentecostal Church Yaroslav “Slava” Pavenko, a twenty-two-year-old chaplain, was helping to lead a worship service, when he had to duck, along with everybody else, under cars and shelters as rockets from the invaders came. The air shuddered and hummed. He wore a bulletproof vest and helmet, but a fragment from a projectile slipped underneath. The chaplain was…

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[nycreligion]

Killed, Pentecostals in Ukraine with church roots in NYC

Yaroslav Pavenko. Photo: Ukrainian Pentecostal Church Yaroslav “Slava” Pavenko, a twenty-two-year-old chaplain, was helping to lead a worship service, when he had to duck, along with everybody else, under cars and shelters as rockets from the invaders came. The air shuddered and hummed. He wore a bulletproof vest and helmet, but a fragment from a projectile slipped underneath. The chaplain was…

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[di-kot-o-me]

Seven ages: first puking and mewling;

Then very pissed off with one’s schooling;

            Then fucks: and then fights

            Then judging chaps’ rights

Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

The lives and limericks of Robert Conquest

[hiawathab]

[hiawathab]

Robert Conquest

On Mao -

There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

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This is another of Conquest’s, which appears in slightly less pointed form (“little Sophie”) in Amis’s memoirs:

The first man to fuck Brigid Brophy

Was awarded the Krafft-Ebing Trophy

Plus ten thousand quid,

Which, for what the chap did,

Will be widely accounted a low fee.

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Perhaps one of his most famous bits of comic verse was his take-off and modernization of Jacques’ famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It:

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.

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Technically expert animadversion on the embarrassing Observer critic Philip Toynbee:

You cannot, when dealing with Toynbee,

Just pay him back in his own coin, be-

Cause talking such piss,

Would come rather amiss:

So how would a kick in the groin be?

[hiawathab]

Robert Conquest, who said, about the historian Arnold Toynbee -

“You cannot, when dealing with Toynbee,

Just pay him back in his own coin, be-

cause talking such piss, would come rather amiss.

So how would a kick in the groin be?”