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There had been by that point a long-standing admiration among the British (and American) intelligentsia for Stalin, the USSR, and in general Soviet Communism; t

There had been by that point a long-standing admiration among the British (and American) intelligentsia for Stalin, the USSR, and in general Soviet Communism; this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country and the aforementioned unprintability of any real criticism of it. The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth. You can also get the key points from Scott Alexander's review of it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...

DoughnutHole 3y ago
> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today. It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky). It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.

DoughnutHole 3y ago

> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today. It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky). It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.