The prophet.(Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History)(Book Review)

Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, by Robert Conquest (Norton, 272 pp., $24.95)

ALL the essays in this volume have memorable lines, but one in particular leaps off the page: "There are other problems than war and terrorism." It would be easy to dismiss this as a forgivable pre-9/11 mindset, coming as it does from one of the 20th century's most distinguished historians. After all, Robert Conquest's life has been bound up with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, which seem epochs away from a world illuminated by the burning towers of the World Trade Center.

But look closer, and Conquest has a point. One day, perhaps sooner than we think, Osama bin Laden will be dead and his al-Qaeda followers, after their brief moment of glory, will pass into historical irrelevance. One day, all of us will be back to the tougher and deeper issues, while a whole new region of the planet, the Middle East, will face the challenge Europe and America faced in the 19th century, and Asia in the 20th: how best to live in the modern age, and how to construct a society according to a progressive Western model.

But which model? That is the central issue that holds together these essays like the keystone of an arch. For as Conquest points out, the West has not only given the world free markets, individual liberty, and democracy under law. It also gave it socialism and socialism's monstrous twin offspring, Communism and Nazism, and the delusion that the all-powerful state could make human beings live together in harmony. Today, these totalitarian programs are dead and discredited; but the ideas, impulses, and even some of the institutions that spawned them are still alive and kicking. They even underpin the gospel of bin Laden.

Who better to sound the warning than Robert Conquest? He was born the year of the Russian Revolution, and raised in England and France by an American father. He joined the Communist party in the Thirties at Oxford. But after seeing Stalin's vicious handiwork in postwar Bulgaria, Conquest turned against the party and became the world's leading chronicler of the horrors of Stalinism in two classic works: The Great Terror (1968), which dealt with Stalin's murderous rule in the mid-Thirties, and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), which revealed how the collectivization of Soviet agriculture led directly to the Great Ukrainian Famine, and the deaths of at least 6 million people--the very people in whose name collectivization was carried out.

I can still remember the sense of hysterical outrage The Great Terror provoked among my leftist college mentors, who dismissed its portrait of the nightmare world of gulags, show trials, and midnight executions as the delusions of a right-wing reactionary. Conquest replied by coining Conquest's Law: "Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands." He knew then what everyone knows now, that it was they, not he, who had deluded themselves about the nature of Communism, and who let or even encouraged another generation to repeat the same atrocities under Mao and Pol Pot.

This is the other theme that echoes throughout this collection: how an arrogant intelligentsia can set off a kind of destructive mania in a society, while insulating themselves from the consequences of their own ideas. In "Choose Your Enlightenment," Conquest demarcates a radical tradition stretching back to the French Revolution, which translated the French Enlightenment's appeal to "exciting generalities" like Rights of Man and Will of the People into a program of deliberate terror and universal conscription, and left behind not one but two sinister legacies: aggressive nationalism on one side, and the bureaucratic dirigiste state on the other. That tradition's later intellectual heirs would enable the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco ...