Dr. George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born July 15, 1917), British historian, became a well known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror.

Robert Conquest was born in Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of an American businessman and a Norwegian mother. His father served in an ambulance unit with the French Army in World War I, winning a Croix de Guerre in 1916. Conquest was educated at Winchester College, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor's and master's degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and his doctorate in Soviet history. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

In 1937, after his year studying at the University of Grenoble and traveling in Bulgaria, Conquest returned to Oxford and joined the Communist Party. Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee.