Robert Conquest, the author of one of the most seminal works on the horrors of Stalin’s gulags, has a new essay reflecting on the republishing of this work almost 40 years later, and the tragic arc of Russian history. Conquest remarks that although Soviet economics have been abandoned, Russia is experiencing “reform without liberalism” in the style of Pyotr Stolypin, leaving the country still very far away from rule of law.

“My book has been faulted for giving too little attention to the context of Russia and of the Russian historical and mental backgrounds. We find what seem to be contradictions. Any reader of the country’s great literature may feel an especially Russian humanism arising from the depths of the “national character.” On the other hand, Ronald Hingley (in his classic The Russian Mind) saw the fictional and the real Russian as living in great dullness interspersed with, or accompanying, extreme outbursts, but also possessed by a view of the country’s past and present as deplorable yet containing as recompense a wonderful future with some sort of national glory compensating for everything. A complementary trait often reported is the fear that a Russian, or Russia, is being deceived or cheated—the sort of thing we see in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and in Soviet xenophobia.“