The Conquest of Light

George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet, and novelist. He was one of the West’s leading Sovietologists during the Cold War and was influential to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Conquest was also affiliated with the anticommunist Information Research Department, within the British Foreign Affairs Office. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968); The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986); and Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.