One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.

No doubt the explanation for this phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically complex. A commonly cited factor that supposedly contributed to it was ignorance of the real situation obtaining in the Soviet Union: intellectuals were therefore able to project on to the Soviet Union their utopian fantasies unconstrained by any appreciation of the sordid realities. This explanation, however, is entirely false.

I mean no disrespect to the brave and colossal labors of figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, nor do I deny the scope of their actual historical effect upon the opinions of the Western intelligentsia, when I say that they added nothing whatever of deep moral significance to the material that was readily available in the west in the 1920s and 1930s, and that could and should have enabled people to form a proper moral judgment about the Soviet Union and its “experiment,” and this at the