There is, indeed, a certain pathos in the way some were deluded on the whole Soviet issue. A couple of years ago, I was sitting at dinner next to a prominent American former Communist who had worked for the U.S. party until the late 1950s. We now learn that even the published text was not a full and genuine transcript. We can see Orwell and Hiss as representatives over the whole period of truth and democracy, on the one hand, and lies and totalitarianism, on the other. But this is not to say that such a straightforward view is even yet unanimously accepted in the West.
Contrary attitudes die hard.
We should remember that it took fifty years and the release of the Soviet documents before Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, obvious from the start, was fully accepted here. Even now, we find book after book, article after article, arguing that the West is as much to blame, or more to blame, than Stalin and his agents. Such stuff is usually the product of academe, with professorial appointments still often made on the basis of political correctness not so much that the appointers know or care about Stalin or the Cold War as that they seek allies in their own struggle against democracy or reality. Chekhov s advice to the Russians of his time to squeeze the slave out drop by drop might be applied to minds in the West not yet fully cleared of the taint of a later servitude. Reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement , August 21, 1998.