Conversion Experience

“The God That Failed,” first published in 1949, is a collection of confessional writings by Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright, and edited by Richard Crossman, the British Labour Party politician and author. At the time of its publication, the authors were well known, and their soul-searching carried genuine weight. With varying degrees of anguish, they addressed the question: Why had they been ardent supporters of the Soviet Union and communist movements subservient to it, and why did profound disillusionment eventually replace their ardor and admiration?This volume, once considered a powerful and authentic testimony, has almost entirely vanished from public awareness, despite its durable insights and discoveries. Even well educated Americans are, for the most part, unaware of it; chances of finding it on reading lists of college courses are remote. Almost two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, few people in the West, let alone in the former communist states, need convincing that the Soviet system was not the wave of the future. But there seems less agreement on whether or not “God” had, indeed, failed — if, by this “God,” we mean the aspiration to bring about quasi-utopian social change through major improvements of human nature like those envisaged by Marxism and championed by communist states in their early incarnation. Even if one takes the position that the God of Marxist ideals and hopes has failed, “The God That Failed” remains an exceptionally instructive document of political infatuation and disenchantment. These writings also provide a far-from-obsolete source of information about the transformation of supposedly critical intellectuals into credulous true believers and back again into intellectuals properly critical of utopian aspirations and the brutal social engineering they inspired and legitimated.There existed, prior to the appearance of this volume, other accounts of disillusionment with communism, written mostly by Soviet defectors. But these attracted little attention. Victor Kravchenko’s “I Chose Freedom” (1946) was an exception that became a best seller, though it was initially greeted with sneering by many Western intellectuals — and by the requisite smear campaign orchestrated by the Soviet authorities.Contributors to “The God That Failed” were well-meaning intellectuals; both their attraction to and disillusionment with the Soviet system had idealistic foundations. They were victims of self-deception rooted in wishful thinking, and of the elaborate deceptions perpetuated by the Soviet Union in its determined quest to create or support highly positive images of itself. These writers were convinced that the Soviet system, guided by wise and selfless leaders, was inspired by lofty ideals, and dedicated to social justice and the eradication of inequalities. They believed that the Soviet Union was qualitatively different from, and superior to, all other historically known societies, a model and inspiration for mankind as a whole.Reasons for their disenchantment varied, but all of them came to the realization that there was a vast gulf between the virtues and noble intentions the Soviet system endlessly proclaimed and the human and institutional realities it had created; they discovered that these ideals and realities in fact diverged quite dramatically. The Soviet people were materially deprived and politically repressed by a breathtakingly mendacious regime.The disenchanted portrayed in this book reached their conclusions by different paths: André Gide, on his conducted tour of the country, learned about the poverty of Soviet people, which contrasted spectacularly with the luxuries lavished on him and other privileged visitors. Arthur Koestler’s disillusionment was also nurtured by his experiences during his travels in the Soviet Union, but reached final fruition only after the arrest of close friends and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Louis Fischer was repelled by the first Soviet show trials he witnessed in 1928, and by the “fawning adulation” directed at Stalin. Ignazio Silone was disheartened by the intolerance and dogmatism of the party officials he met, and the living conditions of workers in Moscow, among other things. Stephen Spender was repelled by the manipulative Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and the demeanor of the Soviet delegation at an international writers’ congress. Richard Wright recognized that the Communist Party officials in America were devious and less interested in racial justice than in promoting the power and influence of the party and the interests of the Soviet Union. All six were repelled by the crude propaganda of the regime, and the discrepancies it perpetuated between social ideals and political realities. They all came to the conclusion that the ends pursued did not justify the means used to attain them, and some also came to question whether those ends could be realized — and how desirable that outcome would be.These eloquent chronicles of disenchantment should not obscure the fact that their authors were a small minority, and that a far greater proportion of Western intellectuals with comparable access to information managed to retain similar beliefs, or at any rate refrained from expressing criticism of the Soviet system. The discrepancy between the numbers of the disillusioned and those who preserved their political disposition (with minor modifications) was even more striking after the 1960s. Those enamored with Third World communist states such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam evinced little discernible soul-searching. Resisting such disenchantment in more recent times was made easier by the sheer numbers of those who supported the political activism and values of the ’60s, which included sympathy for the Third World communist states no less repressive than the Soviet Union used to be. Members of this large subculture could assure one another that their heart was in the right place and, as a result, their youthful commitments required little if any rethinking of them.Thus, paradoxically, “The God That Failed” reminds us that disillusionment is harder to explain than the persistence of faith, political or other, especially if acquired at an early age. It is another enduring message of the book that the idealism of intellectuals — or any other group — is compatible with staggering political blindness and misjudgments, and their vaunted critical impulses melt away under the influence of wishful thinking and positive predisposition. Last, the book reaffirms not only that human beings thirst for meaning, but also that the quest for meaning has increasingly taken political forms, which are shaped by powerful emotional currents.Mr. Hollander’s last book was “The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century” (2006). “Political Violence: Belief, Behavior and Legitimation,” which he edited, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this fall.

Conversion Experience

Conversion Experience

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