Robert Conquest
Research Fellow

Expertise: Russian and world politics and history

Robert Conquest is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

His awards and honors include the Jefferson Lectureship, the highest honor the federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities (1993); the Alexis de Tocqueville Award (1992); the Richard Weaver Award for Scholary Letters (1999); the Fondazione Liberal Career Award (2004); the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005); and the Ukranian Medal of Honor (2006).

He is the author of twenty-one books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs, including the classic, The Great Terror, which has been translated into twenty languages, and the acclaimed Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1986). Other works include Power and Policy in the USSR (1960); Common Sense about Russia (1960); Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961); and Russia after Khrushchev (1965).

Later books are Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Oxford University Press, 1988); Tyrants and Typewriters (Lexington Books, 1989); The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990); Stalin: Breaker of Nations (Viking, 1991); Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999); and The Dragons of Expectation (2005).

Conquest has been literary editor of the London Spectator, has brought out seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies (Macmillan, 1955–63), and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic Prussian Nights (1977). He has also published a science fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955), and is joint author, with Kingsley Amis, of another novel—The Egyptologists. In 1990 he presented Granada Television's Red Empire, a seven-part documentary on the Soviet Union, broadcast on channel 4 in the U.K., the History Channel in the United States, and in various other countries, including Australia and Russia. In 1997 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and a member of The Literary Society. He has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics, a fellow of the Columbia University Russian Institute, a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute.

Educated at Winchester College, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics and his D. Litt. degree in history.

Conquest served through World War II in the British infantry and thereafter in His Majesty's Diplomatic Service, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. In 1996 he was named a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

He is married to Elizabeth Neece, daughter of the late Colonel Richard D. Neece, United States Air Force, and has two sons by a previous marriage.