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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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A HERO FOR FREEDOM-LOVERS EVERYWHERE…...

ROBERT CONQUEST, owner of “the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.” turns 90 this year.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS sought him out for an interview, published in the Wall Street Journal’s WEB JOURNAL

My guess is that many Americans have never heard of Robert Conquest, which is probably payback for showing the world how wrong the New York Times was about the Soviet Union for so many years. When he published THE GREAT TERROR in 1968, Stalin’s crimes were finally chronicled in detail. And recent revelations, since the fall of the USSR, have served to confirm Conquest’s work.

Not only a historian, he’s quite a Renaissance man.

A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and—I forgot to mention—a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, “Harvest of Sorrow,” is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. “There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized ‘The Great Terror.’ And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as ‘anti-Sovietchik No. 1.’ I must say I was rather proud of that.”

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