“Underground papers” were once defined by Kingsley Amis as “newspapers sold outside Underground stations.” It was nice deflation of the Western left’s self-deceiving belief that it was fighting a similar oppression to that endured by the peoples of Eastern Europe and thus entitled to borrow their samizdats and Charter 77s for domestic use. In truth they could hardly even imagine the reality of “really existing socialism” with its occasional outbursts of naked brutality and, more especially, with its everyday pedestrian repression of all individuality, hope, and free expression.

Those leftists who risked crossing the Iron Curtain had one of three sorts of experience. Most were happy to be deceived by the regimes’ Potemkin generosity. Some, briefly distressed by what they saw beneath that façade, rationalized away their distress on returning to really existing liberty. (For a brilliant depiction of this, see Malcolm Muggeridge’s Winter in Moscow, where his Walter Duranty character smoothly explains to himself that the starving people he has just seen are merely isolated cases of malnutrition among social elements resisting the new system of socialist agricultural distribution.) The rest, few in number, came back disillusioned to the extreme point of embracing anti-Communism. Most other people, including those politically unsympathetic to Communism, simply had no idea of what life behind the Curtain was like.

Roger Scruton’s new novel deals with the reality of “really existing socialism” as it was experienced by those who could not even visit something different. It takes place in