Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

• Author: COX, STEPHEN
• Position: Review

* Reflections on a Ravaged Century By Robert Conquest New York: Norton, 2000. Pp. 335. $26.95 cloth.

"I have suggested elsewhere," writes Robert Conquest, "that a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler" (p. 208). That sounds like a good idea to me. I would suggest that a second volume be added, consisting of critical commentaries by Shaw, Neruda, Pound, Sartre, Heidegger, and other intellectual and artistic admirers of the twentieth century's collectivist monstrosities. For a slightly higher price, the publishers could supply a video of great moments from Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl.

Conquest's point is not that the works he mentions are bad art, though probably all of them arc. It is that neither "art" nor "education" was sufficient, in the century just past, to prevent their devotees from ignoring, acclaiming, or collaborating in the murders of hundreds of millions of fellow human beings--sacrifices on the altar of political ideals.

Conquest will take his place in history as an intellectual who devoted himself to telling the simple truth about the vileness of those ideals and acts. His books about the horrors of Soviet history, most notably The Great Terror(1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), showed how wrong other intellectuals were to believe that there was some great moral difference between National Socialism and Soviet Socialism. Although those books have made a large impression on general readers, they have made a remarkably small one on the academics and other thinkers of high thoughts who continue to affirm that Marx was a great political philosopher, not to be judged by the apparent effects of his political theories, whereas such anti-Marxist thinkers as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek were ... well, who exactly were they, anyhow?

Conquest reviews the history of intellectual responses to the Soviet Union with a justifiable sense of outrage. The great writers, the impassioned friends of peace, the profound social thinkers and close students of history have had much to say, and their sayings should not be forgotten. My favorite item from this book is a remark by the historian Manning Clark, "who wrote that Lenin was `Christ-like, at least in his compassion,' and was `as excited and loveable as a little child'" (p. 129-30). Unfortunately, the results of the excited child's experiments were not entirely happy ones.

They were, indeed, pretty much what could have been (and was) predicted by people not burdened with reputedly advanced intellectual equipment. Leave aside, for a moment, the millions of dead bodies. Consider purely practical matters. As Conquest notes, "even now there are fewer miles of paved roads in the whole ex-USSR than in the state of Ohio" (p. 103). Ten years ago, when the Soviet Union was tottering to its end, "Moscow's Health Minister revealed that half the hospitals had no sewerage, 80 percent had no hot water, and 17 percent no piped water at all" (p...