Many twentieth-century European intellectuals were drawn to communism. Looking to the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other communist philosophers gave them hope for a better society, one ruled by equality and rationality. When the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 led to the creation of a socialist state in Russia, many Westerners idealized the new regime and remained steadfastly enthusiastic about its promise even when confronted with evidence about the excesses and horrors of communism.
What was the reasoning behind their idealism? It is possible to maintain, as one essay suggests, that communists and their supporters were genuinely proud of their system and were right to claim that it had improved lives, created opportunity, and lived up to much of its promise. "True believers" may have had a point. The other side of the argument, however, points to evidence that intellectuals worked actively to conceal the horrors of communism or were successfully taken in on a mass scale by deliberate deception. All the while many individuals dismissed credible evidence, which only grew in volume over time. Those who continued to defend communism did so at a loss of their honesty and integrity.



Viewpoint: Yes. Taken in by Soviet propaganda, Western intellectuals believed in communism because they were generally ignorant of its true costs and personally alienated from their own governments and societies.

The defense of communism by Western intellectuals was one of the most disappointing exercises in twentieth-century thought. The sad truth is that legions of writers, professors, artists, journalists, and other Western thinkers ardently defended and extolled an ideology that recent scholarship holds responsible for the deaths of as many as one hundred million people. By the end of the twentieth century an avalanche of evidence proved that almost every attempt to defend communism was founded on ignorance, delusion, and plain dishonesty.

The first communist government, founded in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, attracted a great deal of sympathy from the Western Left. But what appeared to hold so much promise was in fact the most brutal dictatorship known to modern man. Communist rule in Russia, and later in every nation that mimicked it, depended on a secret police, a network of concentration camps, arbitrary terror to cow real or potential opposition, the elimination of independent civil society, the subordination of nearly every aspect of life to the dictatorial control of the state, and a host of other measures that ran roughshod over the traditional Left's ideals of rights, democracy, and freedom.

Immediately after the Bolshevik coup, however, sympathetic Western observers promoted the new system. Perhaps the simplest explanation for this support during communism's earliest years is that few Westerners, particularly intellectuals, either knew much about Russia or bothered to visit there in the decade after 1917. World War I, which ended a year after the Bolshevik coup, and the ensuing Russian Civil War, which lasted until late 1920 in European Russia and longer in the Far East, proved effective barriers even to those who might have been inclined to visit what was still regarded as an exotic and less civilized land. It was far easier to sit around in Western cafés or university dining halls marveling at news of the transformation of Russia, as did the Cambridge University friends of émigré and future novelist Vladimir Nabokov, than to examine it critically. Academic study of Russia remained scant until after World War II. Practical experience there was limited to the relatively small number of businessmen, diplomats, and travelers who had gone there before 1917, and to the refugees who fled afterward. Since few of these individuals had any sympathy for Bolshevism, it was easy, especially for Western Soviet enthusiasts, to dismiss their unflattering testimony and negative opinions as the personal biases of those with an obvious ax to grind. Indeed, in many intellectual circles, the epithet "anti-Soviet" remained synonymous with "biased," "ignorant," and "reactionary" well into the Cold War and in some cases beyond.

At the same time, many sympathetic intellectuals believed steadfastly that any amount of suffering was acceptable as long as it succeeded in advancing their ideals. French poet Louis Aragon used his verse to praise the Soviet secret police and its use of terror. When American philosopher and sometime communist Sidney Hook asked German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht's opinion of the purges that claimed the lives of thousands of committed Soviet communists in the 1930s--people who were virtually never guilty of the crimes of which they were accused--Brecht replied, "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die." As recently as 1994 British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm unapologetically affirmed in a television interview that the sacrifice of fifty to twenty million lives would be acceptable if it furthered the happiness of humanity. Admirers still place long-stemmed roses on Stalin's grave.

Leaving these egregious statements aside, one should not ignore that many in the Western Left had reasons to want the Soviet experiment to succeed. Socialists who had experienced decades of frustration in parliamentary politics were cheered by the success of their more radical Russian colleagues, who, whatever their failings, promised to put some of their shared ideas into practice. Progressives who had long decried the excesses of capitalism looked with hope on what they believed to be a new and promising beginning for humanity, even if it experienced what some chose to call "growing pains." Ideologues who remained devoted to what they thought to be the "unfulfilled promise" of the French Revolution of 1789 believed they saw its final unfolding in 1917. Many mainstream Westerners who had been ill disposed toward tsarist Russia were not unhappy to see it replaced by a regime that at least pretended to the language of democracy.

Looking at the "Soviet experiment" through rose-colored glasses blinded these types to many unpleasant and undeniable truths, however. American journalist John Reed, who witnessed the Bolshevik coup and subsequently reported on Soviet Russia, wrote favorably about "Soviet democracy," even as Vladimir Lenin's dictatorship grew more and more repressive. In the process he, too, became a committed communist. Another American visitor, the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens, declared after visiting Soviet Russia in 1919, "I have seen the future, and it works!," even though the country's urban population had fallen to less than half its pre-World War I figure, famine was ravaging the countryside, and armed resistance to the Soviet government reached its height that year. Why would these noticeable problems escape the attention of such intelligent people? Their desire to see socialism succeed probably had much to do with it, and there is much evidence to suggest that their positive views derived from their preconceptions. Other members of Steffens's traveling party, including future U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union William C. Bullitt, later alleged that the journalist thought up and practiced declaiming his (in)famous comment before they even got to Russia.

While some of the early enthusiasts reported selectively or deceptively on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), in later years the Soviet government took steps to make sure that it received favorable press abroad. Part of its strategy was to minimize its people's contact with foreigners. Within only a few years of the Bolshevik Revolution, it became nearly impossible to travel abroad or emigrate. After Josef Stalin consolidated power in the late 1920s, a period when waves of repression eliminated millions of real or perceived enemies of the regime, people with foreign contacts suffered intensely; the government viewed them as potential conduits of bad news. In the terrorized atmosphere of the 1930s, it became dangerous to stay in touch with friends and relatives abroad or, as one unfortunate stamp collector found out, even to appear to have a foreign correspondence. Eliminating those with real or imagined foreign contacts subsided with the post-Stalin leadership's general departure from mass terror, but interacting with foreigners nevertheless remained taboo well into the 1980s. Foreign travel also remained heavily restricted. Only the most-trusted Communist Party members and most-prestigious cultural figures were permitted to go to the West, even if several of them used that privilege to defect. After being forbidden for decades, emigration became possible, if still extremely difficult, because of its growing importance in the U.S.S.R.'s relations with the United States.

If the Soviet government sought to control what its own people could learn about the West or tell the West about the Soviet Union, its control of foreigners was also rigid. During the purges resident foreigners, a category that ironically included many foreign communists who were living in Soviet exile or had settled in the Soviet Union to help build the utopia, were decimated by arrests and executions. Foreign travel to the U.S.S.R. was heavily regimented by a government tourist agency charged explicitly with isolating tourists from ordinary people. "Study abroad" programs and opportunities for foreign scholars to research in the Soviet Union were not allowed until the 1950s and then were strictly controlled. Secret-police surveillance of foreign residents, often conducted openly with the purpose of intimidating them, remained a standard practice until communist rule began to wane in the late 1980s. Broad sections of Soviet territory, including hundreds of cities and entire regions, were closed to foreigners until the Russian government abolished the restrictions in 1992. Since the government controlled all aspects of political, social, and economic organization, Western investigations of Soviet life encountered a centralized bureaucracy that released piles of documents that naturally only made the Soviet Union look good.

These circumstances threatened to make the manipulation of Western opinion relatively easy. Journalism was subject to particularly strenuous attempts at control, especially in the Stalin years, when state censors read all communications from foreign journalists to their editors, and when journalists were told outright that unfavorable reporting would have major consequences, including, as many found, arrest or expulsion from the country. Well into the 1980s the secret police subjected foreign journalists to varying degrees of harassment, ranging from the standard surveillance that all foreigners had to live with to blackmail about their sex lives. Compliant foreign correspondents, however, could expect excellent treatment, interviews with high-profile figures, and greater access to good material. While many journalists were diligent and took risks to report the truth, others did not. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of articles that denied the existence of a famine that in fact killed several million people, received celebrity treatment for his favorable stories and avoided public exposure in a sex scandal of which the Soviet secret police had evidence. Famous for repeating "I put my money on Stalin," Duranty later became an important adviser on Soviet affairs to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. When confronted with evidence of the famine by skeptical colleagues, he is reported to have remarked dismissively, "they're just Russians." Reed, who also received the royal treatment for his favorable stories on Soviet Russia, was honored with burial in the wall of Moscow's Kremlin, just behind the future site of Lenin's Mausoleum, after he died of typhus (a disease that the Soviet government refused to acknowledge as a national problem) in October 1920. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, cofounders of the British Fabian Society, a non-Marxist socialist organization, wrote a glowing description of the Soviet Union's social and economic development after visiting in the 1930s. In one passage they praised the officials in charge of Stalin's brutal program of agricultural collectivization, marveling at the strong convictions of those who implemented policies that they knew would cause many deaths.

Despite the ease with which such figures could suspend truth to defend the U.S.S.R., one did not have to experience its flattery and threats firsthand to conceal its horrors. In a rare moment of candor about the communist system in which he professed deep belief, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre admitted to a few colleagues that there was indeed a vast network of concentration camps in the U.S.S.R., but condescendingly added that to say so in public would only depress the hopeful and hapless French working class. If admitting that there was oppression threatened the ultimate achievement of utopia, then it was better not to admit that there was oppression.

Duranty's deception has now been so thoroughly exposed that the Pulitzer Board in June 2003 considered stripping him posthumously of his prize (the board ultimately decided not to revoke it). While he and others were consciously deceptive, many Western intellectuals were simply taken in by deliberate Soviet attempts to deceive them. Often already inclined toward socialism, visiting foreign cultural and political figures were invariably treated to luxury travel and accommodations, obsequious receptions, and fulsome praise. In addition to official flattery, the Soviet government organized Potemkin-village-style tours designed to show off its achievements just as much as they were intended to hide its failings. British playwright George Bernard Shaw, another member of the Fabian Society who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s, expressed his enthusiasm for the Soviet educational system when he found that even the waitresses in his dining car had read all of his plays and were eager to discuss them. Naturally, they were specially trained agents planted on Shaw's train to impress the playwright, who later called Stalin a "good Fabian." When leftist French premier Edouard Herriot visited Kiev in 1932, at the height of the famine that Duranty concealed, he was driven along clean streets filled with happy people and prosperous- looking shops. Of course he never said anything about the famine after being treated to these improbable scenes. African American bass Paul Robeson, who toured the U.S.S.R. with much fanfare in 1935, favorably compared Soviet treatment of ethnic minorities to troubled race relations in his own country, but no one ever told him about the millions of non-Russians who had died or were languishing far away from their homes simply because of who they were. As late as 1984, a time of great shortages and just seven years before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Left-wing American economist John Kenneth Galbraith could hail the "solid well being" of the people he saw on a trip to Moscow and comment on the city's well-stocked shops. One wonders what else Soviet officials would have shown him. These high-profile visitors may not have been lying about their impressions, but a generous interpretation of them suggests that they were easily fooled. In the less generous opinion of Soviet expert Robert Conquest, they were "suckers." It is worth noting that Robeson suffered a nervous breakdown after Stalin's successors partially exposed the crimes of his regime in 1956.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes exposed the extent to which sympathetic Western intellectuals had defended the indefensible, popular opinion already saw the true circumstances. No amount of campus idealism could silence the growing chorus of dissidents within communist societies, ignore the admonitions of disillusioned former communists, or refute the increasingly damning body of critical scholarship on communism. As early as 1951, German political philosopher Hannah Arendt concluded, in an analysis that remains relevant and respected, that Soviet communism equaled the insidiousness of German Nazism as a "totalitarian" ideology. Many Western leftists, particularly Americans, appreciated early on that defending communism was an impossible task that would only implicate their moral and ethical foundations, alienate them from the public, and jeopardize the realization of their ideas. Confronted with documents, confessions, mass graves, and other irrefutable evidence, defenders of communism today find themselves more confined to ivory-tower and coffeehouse ghettos of malcontents who are aging, dwindling in number, and ignored. More and more does communism seem to have been "a sad, bizarre chapter in human history" whose last pages have now been written.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. Western intellectuals were throughly convinced that in theory communism offered the best and most promising solutions for humanity's problems and that Soviet failures would be overcome.

In any mass political movement there are those whose moral convictions are less than pure. Many people are power hungry, cynical, opportunistic, and greedy. History is full of examples of individuals joining mass movements for reasons other than improving the lot of humanity. Not all Nazis joined the party because they shared Adolf Hitler's evil vision of the future. Membership in the Nazi Party provided opportunities for social advancement or could have been the difference in being hired for a particular position. Peer pressure can also influence one's choice; sometimes it is easier to join the National Socialists, Fascists, or Communists than to risk alienating one's friends, colleagues, or community. Self-preservation is also a factor. Over the centuries many mass religious movements have threatened those who would not convert. When faced with a choice between a public conversion to the reigning religious power or losing one's head, many people chose the former. Overall, people join mass movements for many reasons.

Yet, ideological conviction is an important factor in assessing the motives of the leadership or intellectuals of a mass movement. Many communist intellectuals genuinely believed in the goals of their movement. German socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg provides a good example. Although her opinions on the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses differed from Russian communist Vladimir Lenin's vision of an elite group of professional revolutionaries who would bring a clear class-consciousness to the workers, she was dedicated to the international communist movement. She emerged as a leader of the Spartacists in Germany, a faction of Independent Socialists who had split from the German Social Democratic Party during World War I. The Social Democratic leadership's support of German war aims caused many of its members, such as Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, eventually to leave the party. Luxemburg's Spartacists later formed the core of the German Communist Party, which was founded in December 1918. None of the evidence indicates that Luxemburg ever became less concerned about the influence of a revolutionary central committee over the international socialist movement. Although she respected Lenin, she disagreed with his means. Nevertheless she remained dedicated to furthering the goals of the proletariat in Germany and in the world. Had she not been murdered during the right-wing reaction to the German revolution in January 1919, she might have been able to lessen the influence of the Bolsheviks over communists within Germany and in the rest of Europe.

Socialist parties in Europe split after World War I, with many members opting for a more peaceful democratic socialism, while others joined the emerging communist parties. One can question the intentions of those who obtained power in these new communist parties. In Germany the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg enabled men such as Ernst Thälmann to rise to power. Thälmann was one of a group of leaders more supportive of "bolshevization." This new group generally supported directives coming from Moscow, including the need to form a united front against the growing fascist threat. However, there were problems. The communist parties were willing to do whatever was necessary to gain power, including fully discrediting the more-moderate democratic socialists. Two groups that shared many ideas about how to solve humanity's problems frequently mistrusted each other more than they did their "bourgeois" and fascist opponents. In Germany this internal conflict made it difficult for the social democrats to unify with the communists against the growing threat from Hitler. By the time they achieved a common platform it was too late.

Much communist activity in the 1920s and 1930s was indeed heroic. For example, communist accounts of this period are replete with self-serving condemnation of their more moderate leftist cousins. By not joining a popular front with the communists against National Socialism, democratic socialists allegedly betrayed the working people of Germany, Europe, and the world. The evidence, of course, questions the communists' sincerity; for example, German communists always ran a separate candidate in the presidential contests of the 1920s. Nevertheless, when Hitler gained power in Germany, the communists rose to the challenge. German communists headed Hitler's enemy list and were the first group he and his followers tried to eliminate. Despite constant pressure during these dark years--including a disastrous initial response in 1934-1935, a betrayal by their Soviet patrons in 1939-1941, and a general ineffectiveness--the surviving communist resisters never wavered in their opposition to Nazi Germany. Self-preservation was part of their motivation during these years. To be a communist meant to risk severe persecution and mortal danger. These men and women who stayed in Germany and maintained the struggle against Hitler were also committed to resisting fascism. Not only did they and their leaders believe that Hitler would lead Germany to ruin, they also were convinced that communism provided the path that everyone should follow.

The former East German Museum for German History provides a good example of how to judge the sincerity of certain communist intellectuals. The museum was founded in 1952 by a committee of East German professors, historians, and writers and was commissioned by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and governing Socialist Unity Party. Nevertheless the director of the museum, heads of its divisions, and most of those who designed the exhibitions were intellectuals. There were many omissions in the history they displayed, most of which overlooked Soviet shortcomings. Visitors in the 1950s would see some interesting explanations. They were told that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 was an example of how two states with different ideologies could coexist peacefully. The exhibit claimed that the Germans violated this pact; apparently the Soviets were content with it. There were no explanations of the Soviet role in the division of Poland or why the enlarged 1941 Soviet border was more sacrosanct than the 1939 one. Viewers were told that the masses in capitalist countries were responsible for forcing their leadership to join the Soviet-led crusade against fascism. There was no reference to the 1953 strikes against the East German regime, even though the overwhelming majority of visitors must have at least heard of this uprising.

These omissions are difficult to justify, but the overall narrative was genuine. It presented the story of the German people's struggle against oppression. The narrative began with the earliest record of Germanic settlement in Central Europe. It highlighted important events in the people's struggle, including the German Peasants' War (1524-1525), the revolutions in 1848 and 1918-1919, the struggle against National Socialism, and the founding of the GDR (1949). Alfred Meusel, first director of the museum, lived through much of the final struggle against fascism. He experienced the uprisings in Kiel (November 1918) that precipitated the revolution. He was a dedicated communist who had to flee in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. His writings on history contain a mixture of German nationalism and loyalty to the Soviet Union. The museum reflected his vision, one that he and his fellow communists lived before the founding of the GDR. Even if some of the details were included to appease the GDR's Soviet patrons, the overall narrative of struggle was something the museum's leadership genuinely believed.

It is difficult to justify all the activities of European communists after 1920. The "bolshevization" of the national parties, the allegiance to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and the antipathy toward more-moderate democratic socialists provide reason to suspect the intellectual integrity of the European communist leadership. However, none of the evidence so far has proved that Thälmann, Meusel, or the thousands of communists who remained in Germany to resist Hitler were not convinced that their way provided the best solutions for humanity's problems. Indeed, they could have been personally alienated from their own societies, as many were, and still believed in communism. In fact, Meusel was a dedicated German nationalist. He participated in at least three of the Deutsche Begegnungen (German Meetings) of the 1950s, assemblies of West and East German intellectuals who were searching for a means to reunify their country. Although the GDR's vision of reunification was prevalent in Meusel's speeches, he was undoubtedly dedicated to Germany. His example shows how difficult it is simply to dismiss the sincerity of Europe's communist intellectuals. Some of them may have had impure motives. Others may have joined the party for personal gain or to survive in a difficult world. Many, however, believed in their cause, and as the example of the German communists who resisted Hitler shows, were willing to die for their dreams of a better humanity.

-- David Marshall, University of California, Riverside


NOR IS THAT ALL!

In a study published posthumously, German socialist Rosa Luxemburg made the following comments about Bolshevik agrarian policy:

A socialist transformation of economic relationships presupposes two things so far as agrarian relationships are concerned:

In the first place, only the nationalization of the large landed estates, as the technically most advanced and most concentrated means and methods of agrarian production, can serve as the point of departure for the socialist mode of production on the land. Of course, it is not necessary to take away from the small peasant his parcel of land, and we can with confidence leave him to be won over voluntarily by the superior advantages first of union in cooperation and then finally of inclusion in the general socialized economy as a whole. Still, every socialist economic reform on the land must obviously begin with large and medium landownership. Here the property right must first of all be turned over to the nation, or to the state, which, with a socialist government, amounts to the same thing; for it is this alone which affords the possibility of organizing agricultural production in accord with the requirements of interrelated, large-scale socialist production.

Moreover, in the second place, it is one of the prerequisites of this transformation, that the separation between rural economy and industry which is so characteristic of bourgeois society, should be ended in such a way as to bring about a mutual interpenetration and fusion of both, to clear the way for the planning of both agrarian and industrial production according to a unified point of view. Whatever individual form the practical economic arrangements may take--whether through urban communes, as some propose, or directed from a governmental center--in any event, it must be preceded by a reform introduced from the center, and that in turn must be preceded by the nationalization of the land. The nationalization of the large and middle-sized estates and the union of industry and agriculture--these are two fundamental requirements of any socialist economic reform, without which there is no socialism.

That the Soviet government in Russia has not carried through these mighty reforms--who can reproach them for that! It would be a sorry jest indeed to demand or expect of Lenin and his comrades that, in the brief period of their rule, in the center of the gripping whirlpool of domestic and foreign struggles, ringed about by countless foes and opponents--to expect that under such circumstances they should already have solved, or even tackled, one of the most difficult tasks, indeed, we can safely say, the most difficult task of the socialist transformation of society! Even in the West, under the most favorable conditions, once we have come to power, we too will break many a tooth on this hard nut before we are out of the worst of the thousands of complicated difficulties of this gigantic task!

A socialist government which has come to power must in any event do one thing: it must take measures which lead in the direction of that fundamental prerequisite for a later socialist reform of agriculture; it must at least avoid everything which may bar the way to those measures. Now the slogan launched by the Bolsheviks, immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants, necessarily tended in the opposite direction. Not only is it not a socialist measure; it even cuts off the way to such measures; it piles up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian agriculture.

The seizure of the landed estates by the peasants according to the short and precise slogan of Lenin and his friends--"Go and take the land for yourselves"--simply led to the sudden, chaotic conversion of large landownership into peasant landownership. What was created is not social property but a new form of private property, namely, the breaking up of large estates into medium and small estates, or relatively advanced large units of production into primitive small units which operate with technical means from the time of the Pharaohs.

Nor is that all! Through these measures and the chaotic and purely arbitrary manner of their execution, differentiation in landed property, far from being eliminated, was even further sharpened. Although the Bolsheviks called upon the peasantry to form peasant committees so that the seizure of the nobles' estates might, in some fashion, be made into a collective act, yet it is clear that this general advice could not change anything in the real practice and real relations of power on the land. With or without committees, it was the rich peasants and usurers who made up the village bourgeoisie possessing the actual power in the hands in every Russian village, that surely became the chief beneficiaries of the agrarian revolution. Without being there to see, any one can figure out for himself that in the course of the distribution of the land, social and economic inequality among the peasants was not eliminated but rather increased, and that class antagonisms were further sharpened. The shift of power, however, took place to the disadvantage of the interests of the proletariat and of socialism. Formerly, there was only a small caste of noble and capitalist landed proprietors and a small minority of rich village bourgeoisie to oppose a socialist reform on the land. And their expropriation by a revolutionary mass movement of the people is mere child's play. But now, after the "seizure," as an opponent of any attempt at socialization of agrarian production, there is an enormous, newly developed and powerful mass of owning peasants who will defend their newly won property with tooth and nail against every attack. The question of the future socialization of agrarian economy--that is, any socialization of production in general in Russia--has now become a question of opposition and of struggle between the urban proletariat and the mass of the peasantry. How sharp this antagonism has already become is shown by the peasant boycott of the cities, in which they withhold the means of existence to carry on speculation in them, in quite the same way as the Prussian Junker does.

The French small peasant became the boldest defender of the Great French Revolution which had given him land confiscated from the émigrés. As Napoleonic soldier, he carried the banner of France to victory, crossed all Europe and smashed feudalism to pieces in one land after another. Lenin and his friends might have expected a similar result from their agrarian slogan. However, now that the Russian peasant has seized the land with his own fist, he does not even dream of defending Russia and the revolution to which he owes the land. He has dug obstinately into his new possessions and abandoned the revolution to its enemies, the state to decay, the urban population to famine.

Source: Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, translated by Bertram Wolfe (N.p.: Paul Levi, 1922; New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1940); Marxists Internet Archive http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch02.htm.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London: Hutchinson, 1990; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (London: Hutchinson, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000).

Stéphane Courtois and others, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

David E. Marshall, "Das Museum für Deutsche Geschichte: A Study of the Presentation of History in the Former German Democratic Republic," dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 2002.

Allan Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985).

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time (London: Collins, 1972).

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: A Memoir (London: Gollancz, 1951).

David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random House, 1993).

S. J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Is Soviet Communism a New Civilisation? (London: Left Review, 1936).