This is a story of belief, disillusionment and atonement. Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was ...
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This is a story of belief, disillusionment and atonement. Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was there as Stalin consolidated his power, through collectivization and its consequences, as the cultural and technical intelligentsia succumbed to the secret police, and as the mechanisms of terror were honed. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this edition, "It was this murderous reality that Stalin's censors worked so assiduously to camouflage, corralling foreign correspondents as their often willing allies." Lyons was one of those allies.Assignment in Utopia describes why he refused to see the obvious, the forces that kept him from writing the truth, and the tortuous path he traveled in liberating himself. His story helps us understand how so many who were in a position to know were so silent for so long. In addition, it is a document, by an on-the-scene journalist, of major events in the critical period of the first Five-Year Plan.As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this new edition, Assignment in Utopia is particularly timely. The system it dissects in such devastating detail is in the process of being rejected throughout Eastern Europe and is under challenge in the Soviet Union itself. The book lends insight into the "political pilgrim" phenomenon described by Paul Hollander, in which visitors celebrate terrorist regimes, seemingly oblivious to their destructive force. The book is valuable for those interested in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, those interested in radical regimes and political change, as well as those interested in better understanding current events in Europe. It will also be useful for the tough questions it poses about journalistic ethics.
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Add this copy of Assignment in Utopia to cart. $56.00, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published by Twin Circle Publishing.
Add this copy of Assignment in Utopia to cart. $132.69, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published by Twin Circle Publishing.
One of the books that Whittaker Chambers held as one of the better observations of the utter failure of the Soviet system. Reading this as well as others like Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow", one can see the horrors of the collectivist mind.
Lyons is prescient about things happening today with this:
"?In the face of inhuman crowding and accumulating shortages the press and Soviet leaders talked of subways, new communal housing, and plans to make the city the world?s most beautiful capital. They boasted of plans as though they were already accomplishments. In life, as in my dispatches, every present tense discomfort was matched with a future tense promise. The mass of the population may have ignored these promises but the smaller group of communists, enthusiasts ?activists? found life more tolerable because they attuned it to their projected future. This capacity to accept the plan for the reality occasionally led to disastrous futility---too many planners felt that the job was completed once they had perfected an impressive blueprint and framed it for their office walls.?*
*Eugene Lyons, ?Assignment in Utopia?, 1937, Harcourt Brace, New York, Page 215.