USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
Western Intellectuals and the Seduction of the Soviet State
12017-07-17T21:57:53-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192371plain2017-07-17T21:57:53-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cSupporting Soviet communism was a grave error on the part of many left-leaning intellectuals. Support for Soviet Russia came, by many, to be seen as a sort of devil’s bargain. Those who maintained support for Stalin were accused of looking the other way as millions died in order to claim some sort of philosophical, political, abstract purity. To sacrifice the common people for political ideology—this was the constant refrain from the anti-communist intellectuals in Europe. Leaders among these anti-communist intellectuals were themselves often former communists or communist sympathizers, men like the great British author George Orwell, who captured the twisted logic of totalitarianism in his famous novel 1984 and portrayed communist ideology perverted in his allegorical satire of Stalinist Russia in Animal Farm. Other writers, like the Hungarian Jew Arthur Koestler, whose brilliant portrait of the Stalinist purge trials, Darkness at Noon, sent waves of discontent throughout the European world, especially in 1940 as the world was at war with Hitler, not Stalin, and it seemed naïve to attack the principle enemy of the enemy.
