Editing Robert Conquest (section)

==Career==
===War years===
In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of the [[World War II|Second World War]], Conquest returned to England.<ref name=Quadrant>{{cite web|title=Vale Robert Conquest, Historian and Poet|url=http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/08/vale-robert-conquest/|website=Quadrant|date=4 August 2015 |publisher=quadrant.org.au|accessdate=15 October 2015}}</ref> As the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and was commissioned into the [[Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry]] on 20 April 1940, serving with the regiment until 1946.<ref>{{London Gazette |issue=34837 |date=23 April 1940 |page=2459 |supp=y}}</ref><ref name="Brown"/>

In 1943 he was posted to the [[School of Slavonic and East European Studies]] (later part of [[University College London]]) to study Bulgarian.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> The following year he was posted to [[Bulgaria]] as a [[liaison officer]] to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to the [[Allied Control Commission]]. At the end of the war, he joined the [[Foreign Office]], returning to the British Legation in [[Sofia]] where he remained as the press officer.<ref name=NYTobit/> In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

===Information Research Department===
In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's [[Information Research Department]] (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] [[Clement Attlee|Attlee]] government<ref name="Leigh"/> in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications."<ref>Timothy Garton Ash. "Orwell's List" (review), ''New York Review of Books'', 23 September 2003.</ref> The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.<ref name="Baltic Worlds 2">{{cite web|last1=Samuelson|first1=Lennart|title=A pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet studies during the Cold War|url=http://balticworlds.com/a-pathbreaker-robert-conquest-and-soviet-studies-during-the-cold-war/|website=Baltic Worlds|accessdate=22 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him.<ref name="Brown"/> He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached [[George Orwell]] for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. [[Orwell's list]], discovered after her death in 2002, included ''[[The Guardian|Guardian]]'' and ''[[The Observer|Observer]]'' journalists, as well as [[E. H. Carr]] and [[Charlie Chaplin]].<ref name="Homberger">{{cite news |last=Homberger |first=Eric |date=5 August 2015 |title=Robert Conquest obituary |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest |newspaper=The Guardian |accessdate=11 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of [[Donald Maclean (spy)|Donald Maclean]], one of the [[Kim Philby|Philby]] spy ring, who fled to Russia with [[Guy Burgess]] in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems.<ref name="Brown"/> At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on in ''The Great Terror''. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts&nbsp;– a Communist Tactic".<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.{{citation needed|date=October 2020}}

===Writing===
In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> After he left, he says, the Information Research Department (IRD) suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book.<ref name="Leigh">{{cite news |last=Leigh |first=David |author-link=David Leigh (journalist) |date=27 January 1978 |title=Death of the department that never was |url=http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/e/fo_deceit_unit_graun_27jan1978.html |newspaper=The Guardian |accessdate=11 September 2015}}</ref> During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London by [[the Bodley Head]] as the Soviet Studies Series.<ref name="Leigh"/> Many of his Foreign Office works were published this way.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In the United States, the material was republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by [[Greenwood Publishing Group|Frederick Praeger]], who had previously published several books on communism at the request of the CIA,<ref name="Leigh"/> in addition to works by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], [[Milovan Đilas]], [[Howard Fast]], and [[Charles Patrick Fitzgerald]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Richard D. |date=5 June 1994 |title=Frederick A. Praeger Dies at 78; Published Books on Communism |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/05/obituaries/frederick-a-praeger-dies-at-78-published-books-on-communism.html |newspaper=The New York Times |access-date=27 July 2018}}</ref>

In 1962–1963 Conquest was literary editor of ''[[The Spectator]]'', but he resigned when he found the job interfering with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union were ''Common Sense About Russia'' (1960), ''The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities'' (1960) and ''Power and Policy in the USSR'' (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included ''Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair'' (1961) and ''Russia After Khrushchev'' (1965).<ref name=Telegraphobit/>