Grand Inquisitor.

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: Review

Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 317 pages, $26.95

It is in the latter part in Evelyn Waugh's novel Officers and Gentlemen (1955) that Guy Crouchback, his disillusionment with the Second World War swiftly mounting, recalls reading "of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modem age in arms."

For Crouchback, as indeed for Waugh himself, there was something indecent in the Allies' embrace of the U.S.S.R. after Hitler two-timed Stalin. For where there was Stalin there was no God, a point rather more important to the Catholic Waugh than to the utilitarian practitioners of the balance of power who reckoned that wars are won by men, and that Stalin had a great number to offer. Yet Crouchback's ruminations go beyond Catholic spite: Inherent in his thoughts is a striving for a middle ground between the opposing, if never opposite, poles of Nazism and Communism, where the notion of "just war" has meaning, and where an enemy is, reassuringly, unambiguously, the Enemy.

In his most recent book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, eminent historian Robert Conquest often comes across as a latter-day Crouchback. Conquest is someone in perpetual search of the reasonable middle, at ease with the customary--those habits and principles born of experience. After decades spent in dogged investigation of the Soviet Union's more extravagant crimes, Conquest now launches an assault against the tyranny of abstract Ideas, those vindicating the forcible, unnatural shaping of human actions.

More often than not in the past century such Ideas were born of a ruinous conceit "that utopia can be constructed on earth." Conquest's favored path is the evolutionary, not the revolutionary, whose practitioners, in their inability to entertain alternatives, seek to impose dogma through the systematic dismantling of rival beliefs, and, too often, murder. This impulse Conquest describes using a most effective neologism: mindslaughter.

Yet this forms only part of Conquest's meditations, which collectively make up a curious book. Reflections is, in fact, three things: a retrospective, as the title suggests, allowing Conquest to assess, once again, the devastation wrought by ideological excess during the 20th century; an impertinent, at times myopic, interpretation of the global Zeitgeist from someone with a hefty reservoir of outrage; and a pamphlet, with the last segment of the book devoted to pleading the case for a new transoceanic, English-speaking association of states.

In his philosophical approach and in the intellectual markers that he employs, Conquest seems an anachronism. His accounts of ideological confrontations past, which make up a sizable portion of Reflections, may strike younger readers as vintage Cold War posturing. Some may find themselves magnanimously agreeing that Conquest, now in his 80s, should be given his say. After all, he is one of the few who surveyed the gamut of volatile transactions between the U.S.S.R. and the West, and who emerged from the fracas with the verdict of history leaning considerably in his favor. Yet giving Conquest his say need not mean finding him relevant to what lies...