Letters published in the New York Review of Books usually take the form of invective (“In his woefully inadequate essay on Incan virgin sacrifice…”), not tribute. So it was a rare occurrence indeed to behold Robert Conquest’s amicable missive to this liberal journal of opinion in response to a footnote in John Banville’s March review of House of Meetings, Martin Amis’s new novel set in the gulag:

I am particularly glad to read in [Amis’s] acknowledgments the tribute to Tibor Szamuely, who understood Stalinism better than I did. I remember saying to him that I could see why Stalin had Marshal Tukhachevski shot, but why did he do the same to his old friend Marshal Yegorev? Tibor’s answer was “Why not?”

Someone who understood Stalinism better than Robert Conquest is surely worthy of our attention, and in the case of Tibor Szamuely that gnomic “Why not?” hints at great reserves of hard-won comprehension. The Soviet Union never lacked for brilliant dissidents from the ranks of the academy, which was at once a snare for their expansive talents as well as a catalyst for their political awakenings. Szamuely, however, lived a regrettably short life (he died at forty-seven), wrote exactly one book, The Russian Tradition, for which he should be bettered remembered, and came from what might be called Communist aristocracy. His biography seems more at home in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, a fact he no doubt would have appreciated as