Add this copy of The Western Intelligentsia & the Soviet Union-an to cart. $32.00, like new condition, Sold by Liberty Bell Publications rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from York, SC, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Sussex: Historical Review Press.
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Like New. Unread and unopened! (Hard to list as 'New' when it's 33 years old). 18pp. Stapled format. ISBN: 0-9516877-0-0. Slight scuff on cover. See photos. From item: LENIN supposed, in 1919 at any rate, that "capitalists" and "imperialists" would gang up on Communist Russia. Not long after, he saw things differently; there were âÂÂÂÂuseful idiotsâ™ in the West, and âÂÂÂÂcapitalist deaf-mutesâ™ who could be hanged with the rope that they themselves will sell usâ™. We now know, thanks to glasnost, what horrors were perpetrated in the Russian Revolution's name. You might have expected that these horrors would be noted by right-thinking people, safely in the West. Dr. Heald has given us a melancholy and long list of people in the West who gave aid and comfort to Stalin. The list includes people who regarded themselves as highly progressive in matters of their own countries-Bernard Shaw, for instance, or Edmund Wilson, or Louis Aragon, or Bertolt Brecht. The list goes on and on, of people who endorsed Stalin at his worst. It could have been lengthened up to the present time, for there have been western luminaries going into Brezhnev's state and pronouncing (a) that Dissidents represented nobody, (b) that the nationalities question had been mainly'solved' and (c) that the economy worked without inflation or unem-ployment. These were people who ought to have known better, or at any rate seen that they knew too little to say anything of substance. Instead, as Lenin foresaw when he extracted credits from the West in the early 1920's, they rushed over themselves to give comfort or money. In some cases, you cannot exclude corrupt deals. In the vast majority of cases, there was was no ordinary corruption-nothing much beyond hot dinners in a stifling Moscow hotel, some lionizing, and, in those cases where the temptation existed, floods of drink. What these people did was to export their native grievances. It is one of the strongest possible arguments against our taking the political opinions of the intelligentsia seriously that so many were so tremendously wrong. Malcolm Muggeridge's Winter in Moscow remains the greatest statement of this. The question is ever topical: should the West now step in to rescue Mr. Gorbachev, as the Soviet Empire disintegrates into economic chaos and fighting nationalities? Or should we bear in mind that this is still a country that is vastly over-armed in terms of its own resources? I do not know the answer to this. But a reading of the history of western responses to the Soviet Union is an essential preliminary for an answer, and in that sense Dr. Heald's careful list of people who made fools of themselves is a good contribution.
