Myths and Minds

The whole of Conquest's investigation of how and why the disastrous mental distortions of the last century arose is worthy of detailed study. But the chapter in which he outlines the ways in which totalitarian myths have influenced Western minds stands out in particular as a demonstration of past folly and as a warning for the future.

"The Great Error: Soviet Myths and Western Minds" is devoted to an analysis of "the delusive view of the Soviet phenomenon to be found in Western intellectual, or near intellectual, circles in the 1930s and to some extent again in the first postwar decade and later" - a view which, Conquest adds, "will be incredible to later students of mental aberration."

With the reservation that it would take "a small encyclopedia" to do justice to the full list of Western dupes of the Soviet Union, the author embarks on a survey of the figures who dominated this field of delusion, and the possible motivations that may have inspired them. One central concept here is that of "socialism":

The comfortable word "socialism" was...a major mind-trap. It signified for three or four generations a political and economic system free from guilt. Society, instead of private persons, would run (and was running) the Soviet economy. Or rather, since society could not do so, the state would do so and was doing so for it. In any case, the great result would be the end of "capitalism". "Socialism" was what Lenin, Stalin and their successors claimed to be practicing. They came, after all, from a section of the old Socialist movement. And by the mid-1930s capitalism, private ownership, had indeed been destroyed in the Soviet Union. And what could the noncapitalist order be but socialism? And this, or something like it, possessed the minds of many in the West for another thirty or forty years.

The ethical argument, if such it can be called, seems to run:

1) there is much injustice under capitalism:
2) socialism will end this injustice;
3) therefore anything that furthers socialism is to be supported,
4) including any amount of injustice.


Conquest shows how the Idea of socialism, which had entered many minds in the West over a couple of generations, came to be built around the concept of social justice, supposedly incarnated in the Soviet Union, even when the content of that concept had more or less ceased to exist:

There was... an unjustified mental leap between attacking the misdeeds of capitalism and accepting the Soviet Union as a model. Lincoln Steffens had been a fearless exposer of political and financial corruption in the United States. How could he go to Russia in the 1920s and say, "I have seen the future and it works," of a barely viable terror regime?

In a crucially important passage that follows, Conquest adds:

One role of the democratic media is, of course, to criticize their own governments, draw attention to the faults and failings of their own country. But when this results in a transfer of loyalties to a far worse and thoroughly inimical culture, or at least to a largely uncritical favoring of such a culture, it becomes a morbid affliction - involving, often enough, the uncritical acceptance of that culture's own standards.

He makes the point that while many Western intellectuals (and near-intellectuals) of the 1930s saw themselves as transcending their allegiance to their own country or culture in the interests of the most worthy cause of socialism and the fight against "what appeared to be a muddled and exhausted political system", they in fact merely ended up betraying their own principles. Far from transcending their roots, and attaining an abstract purity of motive, what most of these deluded people did was to ignore the very evidence that stared them in the face:

As Albert Camus pointed out of French Sovietophiles, it was not so much that they liked the Russians as that they 'heartily detested part of the French.'... Seeing themselves as independent brains, making their choices as thinking beings, they ignored their own criteria. They did not examine the multifarious evidence, already available in the 1930s, on the realities of the Communist regimes. That is to say, they were traitors to the human mind, to thought itself.

The chapter goes on to examine some of the most glaring examples of the self-deception that characterized much of "thinking opinion" in the 1920s and 1930s: the pronouncements of Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, of George Bernard Shaw, who, visiting the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist famine, reported on his return to England that he had seen "an overfed population", of H.G. Wells, who said of Stalin that he had "never met a man more candid, fair and honest", and attributed Stalin's power and ascendancy to those supposed qualities, "since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him." Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few independent observers in England at the time, who also visited the Soviet Union at this period, wrote of "Quakers applauding task parades, feminists delighted at the sight of women bowed down under a hundredweight of coal, architects in ecstasies over ramshackle buildings just erected and already crumbling away." As Orwell complained: "Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles."

There follows an examination of the case of the American journalist Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, who in 1933 was in no doubt as to the actual situation in the Ukraine. The British charge d'affaires in Moscow wrote in a dispatch: "According to Mr Duranty the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga had decreased in the past year by three million, and the population of the Ukraine by four to five million. The Ukraine had been bled white... Mr Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year".

Yet Duranty, who received the Pulitzer Prize for "dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia", did not only suppress the facts about the famine in his reports for his newspaper - he actually wrote that "any report of famine" was "exaggeration or malicious propaganda." His false reporting had an influence that was far-reaching and disastrous.

In the sections that follow, Conquest shows how the Sovietophiles tended to be dominated by a certain time of human being: those who claimed to be in possession of special knowledge unavailable to the "layman", "experts" in their field, who could inform ignorant Western politicians of the "true situation". This type, still prevalent today in many Western universities, where they parade as "academics", has its roots in such figures of the 1920s and 30s as the Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, whose massive, 1,200 page tome entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (the question mark was removed in the second edition) appeared in 1937, just as the Moscow trials were reaching their climax of macabre, all-embracing terror.

I think this chapter of the book should be required reading not only for students of Russian and Soviet history and politics, but also for anyone entering on the study of European and American history of the twentieth century. Conquest's description and analysis of the way in which, during the 1930s, essentially noble and generous impulses, such as those that sought to oppose Nazism and the rise of fascism in Italy and Spain, were subverted, corrupted and channeled for pro-Soviet ends, makes chilling reading. His diagnosis of the "addiction" to Marxism that afflicted many of those who belonged to the educated classes in England, the United States, and Australia, and that led to the emergence of ideological traitors, such as the Soviet spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, does not sit comfortably with the modern tendency to "forget and forgive". "What," the author writes, "should be our answer to such a defense [the false defense given by the spy Anthony Blunt, that he "could not betray his friends"], whether from the Blunts or the Joyces, the Berias or the Eichamnns? I have yet to see a better answer than John Sparrow's thesis that 'their guilt's not mitigated by the fact that they believed their aim to be a good one; they must be judged ultimately by reference to the cause to which they dedicated themselves... If it seems hard to condemn a man on moral grounds for an intellectual error in the choice of ends... the answer is surely that the lie that betrays him is a lie in the soul; that the causes men dedicate themselves to... reveal the kind of person that they really are.' Blunt and Burgess and the others brought to a rotten cause a rottenness that was already in them."