Remember Robert Conquest

[Togo]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest

A great man passes. No doubt the left wing echo chamber is already trawling for a victim, to accuse him of sex crimes.
There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That great Marxist Stalin did ten in.

[Peter Pedant]

// So what was the left wing echo chamber all about?//

R conquest was right wing and so detractors post mortem ( = people who criticise Conquest after his death ) would tend to be left wing - and the echo chamber would be that they would keep repeating the same thing over and over again

rather literary I thought
I quite liked it

[Togo]

//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.

I think he would have been pleased to be called Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn.

[vetuste_ennemi]

“He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn".
Conquest, whom I praise for his book The Great Terror, did not endanger his own life by his criticism of Stalinism,Togo; Solzhenitsyn did. So I think the compliment is somewhat unfair to the latter.
A similar imbalance of risk occurred to me recently when I watched (on YouTube) a two hour hatefest against America featuring Noam Chomsky and Robert Fesk: on the one hand the intellectual who's dedicated his life to vilifying his country in complete safety, on he other a courageous journalist who spent ten years in Lebanon at the height of the troubles.

[Togo]

You have a fair point vetuste, but I am sure that Solzhenitsyn took great comfort and was emboldened in the knowledge that the outside world had an insight into what was occurring in the Stalinist regime. We truly do take our freedom of speech and expression for granted.

[lindapalmara]

Doesn't take long to bad mouth someone who isn't cold in his grave! He may have been an 'open' member of the Communist Party but he was also a member of the Carlton Club. The Club is full of historical items from a political era spanning hundreds of years, reflecting its association with the Conservative Party. Like someone said, most 30s Oxbridge students brushed with Communism.

He also had a Doctorate in Soviet history which uncovered the horrors of the Marxist and Stalinist Regimes, enabling him to write the Great Terror. This does not mean he was 'licking up to the right wing Americans' as stated by Sandyroe.

[Togo]

lindapal. You are very close there to BA. sandy is from what I read on these posts something of an erudite man with a gentle persuasion for teasing the unwary. Don't forget that the guilty always accuse someone else, to negate the defence that, it was not me it was you. He also appears to have connections to our Irish brethren, some of whom have had very close political affiliations to the funds available in the USA. Licking up maybe. Still not worth having a major division amongst ourselves. Hope the diet is going well sandy. lindapal some of his limericks were quite brilliant and succinct. The Great Terror it really was for some of us of a certain age.