George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG is an Anglo-American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Robert Conquest was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of an American of independent means and an English mother. His father served in an American Ambulance Service unit with the French Army in World War I, being awarded the Croix de Guerre with silver star in 1916. Conquest was educated at Winchester... College, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor's and master's degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and his doctorate in Soviet history. In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford, joining both the Carlton Club and, as an 'open' member, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee. When World War II broke out, Conquest joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
more