The Worst of Times.

Mr. Harris, a journalist and novelist, is author of Fatherland, Enigma, and, most recently, Archangel.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest (Norton, 336 pp., $26.95)

History is not what it was. Or, to put it another way, what we were encouraged in the schoolroom, or even the college lecture hall, to regard as an immutable series of facts turns out to be a shifting pattern of argument and interpretation, as substantial as smoke. Winston Churchill put it rather well in November 1940, in a clever and-under the circumstances-remarkably generous eulogy of his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values . . .

Ten or twenty years from now, looking back with fresh eyes on this bloody awful era-this "ravaged century," as Robert Conquest calls it in his new book-we might pick something else entirely as the defining moment of the years 1900 to 2000. But for now there seems no contest. The Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 was the single great event-the rock dropped into the pool, if you like-from which almost everything else that has happened radiated. I suppose it is conceivable that Adolf Hitler would still have come to power in Germany, or that there would have been a second great world war-a conflict of ideologies-that killed 50 million, or that there would have been a Marxist revolution in China, or a nuclear arms race-but it is surely unlikely. Lenin's seizure of power changed everything, and it is entirely appropriate that Conquest's reflections on the century should concentrate mainly on the phenomenon of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

The USSR existed for nearly three-quarters of the last 100 years, and the image it presented was always in transition, first revolutionary, then innovative, threatening, immutable, sclerotic, obsolescent, pitiful-and now, finally, insane. This is the underlying theme of Conquest's book: that Soviet history is finally a record of madness. He treats it, and with some reason, as a case study in collective delusion: a monument to a certain type of intellectual's capacity for seizing upon an Idea and pursuing it with a fanaticism that takes it beyond logic into the realm of the absurd.

It is, unexpectedly, a rather funny book, for how else, except with a certain grim humor, can one begin to describe how the ideas of an eccentric, desk-bound, 19th-century bourgeois came to dominate a large swath of humanity? That Karl Marx, like many other earthly deities, was something of a crackpot, with a belief in such Victorian pseudo-sciences as phrenology, was apparent even to his disciples. (On first meeting the Master, Wilhelm Liebknecht found himself having his skull deftly checked by Marx's fingers.) He left behind a system of ideas and predictions that have proved spectacularly wrong in almost every particular, and were starting to look creaky even by 1900-so much so that Lenin had to invent the concept of a "socialist vanguard" to impose a revolution on a proletariat not noticeably eager for one. As Conquest puts it: "Lenin saw that history was not behaving in accordance with Marxist theory, so he decided to force it to do so by subjective effort, like some phrenologist finding one of his subjects lacking the right bumps and producing them by clouting him on the head."

The first 20 years of Soviet Communism represented, by a very considerable margin, the most repressive and bloody regime the world had ever witnessed, a despotism statistically many hundreds of times more murderous than the one it had replaced. Between 1860 and 1914, the Tsarist authorities were responsible for, at most, 20,000 dead. In 1937 and 1938 alone, Stalin killed 2 million, often in circumstances of baroque and almost hallucinatory terror (Stalin's "senior poisoner," a Colonel Maironovski, personally accounted for 150 victims), while in the camps of the Gulag, in the words of Izvestia at the end of the Communist era, millions suffered "unbearable toil, cold and starvation, unheard-of degradation and humiliation, a life that could not have been endured by any other mammal." And for what? It now appears that the Soviet economy grew, in the 1930s, by just 3.5 percent a year-a meager omelet indeed for the breaking of so many eggs.

All of this is horribly familiar, not least from Conquest's own pioneering research over the past 30 years. What is, perhaps, more pertinent to the modern reader-especially the modern clever reader-is to contemplate the extent to which a kind of mass psychosis overtook intelligent Western observers. How could H. G. Wells have written, on meeting Stalin in 1934, in the wake of the extermination of the kulaks and the famine in Ukraine, that "I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest . . . I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him"? How was it possible for the socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb-in 1937, at the height of the Terror-to publish a 1,200-page description of a phantom civil society ("a new civilization"), which in reality existed only on paper? Why was Walter Duranty of the New York Times awarded a Pulitzer prize for his "dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia," when he privately estimated that 7 million had died in the famine of 1933, but publicly insisted in his newspaper that "any report of famine" was "exaggeration or malignant propaganda"?

The glib and obvious answer is that they were taken in by Stalin, just as Chamberlain was deceived by Hitler. But this is unfair to Chamberlain, who, for all his faults, never lauded Nazism as "a new civilization" or claimed that Hitler was where he was because no one was afraid of him. It seems that Stalin's apologists, as Orwell and Koestler noted early on, deliberately suppressed their critical faculties in pursuit of the dream of the perfect Idea.

It goes on still. Conquest includes a devastating transcript of a 1994 interview given by his fellow octogenarian British historian, the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm. Asked whether it would have made any difference to his Communist commitment if he had known in 1934 that millions were dying in "the Soviet experiment," Hobsbawm replied (with, I suppose, commendable honesty), "Probably not." The interview continued:

Interviewer: "What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?"

Hobsbawm: "Yes."

One can imagine the ensuing outcry if any historian had said that Hitler's victims were a price worth paying for the "radiant tomorrow" of destroying Bolshevism. A few years after unburdening himself of this opinion, Hobsbawm was made a Companion of Honour to the Queen by the incoming Labour government. As Conquest rightly puts it: "The delusive view of the Soviet phenomenon to be found in Western intellectual, or near-intellectual, circles in the 1930s . . . will be incredible to later students of mental aberration." It is fairly incredible now.

Casting around for anything remotely comparable in modern history, one might with justice go back to the early 17th century, when a belief in witches suddenly gripped the minds of educated men in Europe. Tens of thousands of innocents, some as young as 4, were accused of sexual communion with the Devil, and consumed by fires set up in the market squares of some of the most civilized cities on earth. This irrational terror, as Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out more than 30 years ago, "grew and grew terribly" only after the Renaissance, and was forwarded by the cleverest men of the day-"by the great Protestant reformers, by the saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers, and churchmen of the age of Scaliger and Lipsius, Bacon and Grotius, Berulle and Pascal." Trevor-Roper could find no logic to explain this reversion to barbarism and declared it simply "a perplexing phenomenon: a standing warning to those who would simplify the stages of human progress."

This capacity of the human mind-in particular, the intelligent human mind-to seize on a doctrine that, with hindsight, appears almost crazy, to believe in it despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, and to assert it even at the cost of appalling suffering -indeed, almost to revel in that suffering, as if it were itself an index of the doctrine's worth-is what Conquest seeks to understand. And, of course, it cannot, finally, ever be fully understood. For while one can easily list-in a proper, "objective," Marxist manner-all the various economic and historical forces that led to the rise of Lenin and Stalin and Hitler, one will nonetheless miss the point entirely if one fails to recognize that human beings are fundamentally not rational, and are likely at any moment to be seized by a collective impulse towards some grand Idea, be it Marxism, fascism, or hysteria about witches. Conquest, in the end, comes very close to issuing a plea for a kind of decent apathy and tolerant indifference towards politics: "All the major troubles the world has had in our era have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania."

This is a fairly comfortless conclusion, but it seems to me correct. History, as Churchill observed, is essentially a question of perspective, and what seems right-thinking today may look like the grossest barbarity 50 years from now. I can't help feeling that all those Western businessmen who recently flew to Peking to toast the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist regime (which killed more victims than Stalin and Hitler combined) would have been wise to pack a copy of Conquest in their luggage.