The opinions of any man as experienced as Robert Conquest should be recorded and dissected. In his latest book, Conquest offers us his insight on current events and the future of Western civilization.

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Conquest served in World War II with the British Army in Bulgaria and even liaised with the Red Army, before they became his enemy. He became an expert on the Soviet Union in the years following World War II and witnessed firsthand the spread of Marxism-Lenin- ism through Eastern Europe . In his younger days, he admits, now at age 90, he was misled by Soviet propaganda and through state-organized tours of the country—but so were many others. Conquest documented the Stalin-era purges of the 1930s in detail with his most famous work, The Great Terror. He critiqued the USSR ’s political system and predicted its eventual collapse in Common Sense About Russia, written in 1960, and in other texts. Despite his historical-political affinity, Conquest also wrote a great deal of poetry and some science fiction. Ever the cultured man, he speaks and reads several languages, including Bulgarian, French, and Russian.

The book is, in a sense, a look back over Conquest’s long and exciting life. Most notable, of course, are his scathing denunciations of Western intelligentsia who were all wrong about Stalin’s regime and the Soviet Union in general. Having worked for so many years to report the truth about the Communist system, Conquest takes a great deal of pride in pointing out how right he really was.

Devout readers of Conquest’s other work will recognize his article in CNN’s Cold War Documentary, a compendium of critiques edited by Arnold Beichman, a long-time friend of Con- quest and fellow Hoover Fellow. Elements of The Dragons of Expectation can be found in Present Danger and his 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Conquest also expands on the Anglosphere proposal he articulated a few years ago in Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Despite the repetition, the overwhelming majority of this new book is original and well worth the read, especially his reappraisals of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet- Nazi alliance.

Those eager for his thoughts on cur- rent events will not be disappointed. He attacks the modern art world, telling the story of a man who sold his feces to a gallery at a price per ounce more than the worth of gold. He criticizes interest groups who can “bring pres- sure to bear on the political and other institutions far more strongly than their numbers or their popular or even media influence would justify,” citing those who advocate allowing women to join combat infantry as an example. He describes the UN as “more like a stock exchange or a hockey field than a nice family picnic,” assailing the world body as “useless or worse” when it comes time for action. Tellingly, he doesn’t sound-off on Iraq .

Conquest has long been a critic of various strands of “intellectual,” “liberal,” and “progressive” thought. He describes Foucault, for example, as a “freak fashion,” and denounces “academic logobabble.” He writes of “a mind-set to unscramble” and notes that “a supposedly educated class has unfortunately usually included a stratum alienated not only from its own society’s values but also from reason and fact.” He condemns “tedious and pointless articles” by academics eager to get published and warns that education no longer seems geared to training students how to think critically.

In this uphill battle against the forces of delusion, some may ask if the fight is worth it. Is there a point to refuting idiotic theories and groundless claims, particularly from the Left? Yes, says Conquest, for “it keeps our critical faculties exercised and our powers of dupe-detection up to scratch. And I think we can add, more broadly, that even the Thermopylaes have, if not yet decisively, slowed down the barbarian hordes.”