It is essential to mark the passing of one of the great historians and enemies of totalitarians of all varieties. Robert Conquest passed away on August 3 at aged 98. I think it is even possible that I read every one of his books [UPDATE: I just went to look at what he’d written – I got nowhere near it]. This is from The Telegraph in London picked up at Powerline:

Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, another former communist, meant when he said to the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that “the final battle” of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two sides they represented.

An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.

The most dedicated anti-socialists are former socialists, which I have seen often. Of what he wrote, I have found his Three Laws of Politics amongst the greatest insights you are likely to find anywhere:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

But if you want his best quote of them all, it is his suggested title for the reprint of his The Great Terror after the Berlin Wall had fallen and his estimates of death by gulag had turned out to be too small: “How About”, he said, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”. When dealing with the left, there are many instances when you feel like saying it, but no one has ever had the right to those words more than he did.