The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

In this book Conquest was even more critical of western left-wing intellectuals than he had been in The Great Terror. At the end of the war he joined the Foreign Office returning to the British Legation in Sofia. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census.

2008). He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG (born 15 July 1917) — known as Robert Conquest — is an Anglo-American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s (1968 4th ed.