The affection precedes the Second World War. Victor Gollancz, a notable left-wing publisher at the time, wrote this mea culpae in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribben

The affection precedes the Second World War. Victor Gollancz, a notable left-wing publisher at the time, wrote this mea culpae in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to his disillusionment with the Soviet cause. >Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere. >I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone. >I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.