Stalin's prosecutor: RIP Robert Conquest, the historian who held the Soviets accountable.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Obituary

TO UNDERSTAND the moral and literary power with which Robert Conquest wrote, consider the second sentence in his book Harvest ofSorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, a study of the 14.5 million deaths that resulted from Joseph Stalin's murderous takeover of his nation's agricultural sector: "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book."

As Conquest's friend, the British novelist Martin Amis, would later observe with a palpable shudder, "The sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 4II pages long." The math is too terrible to contemplate.

Conquest, who died of pneumonia on August 3 at the age of 98, was many things: a highly regarded anti-modernist poet, a military intelligence officer, a diplomat, a scholar, a ribald prankster, a serial non-monogamist (four wives punctuated with countless entanglements), even a dystopian science fiction novelist.

But most of all he was Stalin's personal prosecutor, over and over placing him in the dock of history to answer for his monstrous crimes. Conquest wrote more than a score of books on Soviet history and politics, two of them--Harvest of Sorrow and 1968's groundbreaking The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the Thirties--considered the definitive texts on the pure wickedness of the events they describe. "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy," Stalin once said. Fortunately, Conquest was there to stack it right back up.

The British-born son of an American father and an English mother, Conquest was educated at Oxford, where he joined the Communist Party and visited the Soviet Union in 1937. That started a process of disillusionment that gained speed when Conquest served as a British military intelligence liaison to Russian-commanded Bulgarian resistance forces and hit critical mass when he stayed on in Bulgaria as a diplomat after the war and witnessed Stalin's brutal Sovietization of the country. By 1948 he was back in London, writing an increasingly hostile series of Foreign Office research papers on Soviet activities in Eastern Europe that would eventually morph into his books.

The first of those, Common Sense About Russia, appeared in 1961. But it wasn't until 1968, with the publication of The Great Terror, that Conquest truly...