Letters to the Editor
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‘To Russia With Love’
Christopher Willcox’s excellent article on Warren Beatty’s “Reds” [Arts and Letters, “To Russia With Love,” October 17, 2006] deserves a gloss with respect to his mention of Rebecca West. She is paired with Max Eastman as one of those writers who “certainly had second thoughts about their earlier radical sympathies.”
West never supported the Russian Revolution. As early as 1917, while the revolution was in progress, she published an article predicting that it would not turn out well. To be sure, she began her public life as a Fabian socialist, but very early on she determined that the revolution’s failure to establish the Rule of Law (a phrase she liked to capitalize), a guarantee of individual rights, and an independent judiciary would doom the Soviet Union as a potential model for other socialist movements.
In the early1920s West befriended Emma Goldman and sponsored her visit to England, making certain that H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and other important opinion makers could hear in person Goldman’s condemnation of the Soviet Union. To West’s dismay, the left discounted Goldman’s testimony, which disclosed that the Reds were not merely making serious mistakes but were, in fact, a criminal class.
Outraged by the left’s blindness, West wrote a preface to Goldman’s book, “My Disillusionment with Russia,” in which she observed that Goldman’s ability to speak Russian and to understand as few others could how that country was being turned into a Gulag was deemed to be by those on the left in the worst possible taste. As West noted, Goldman’s detractors were people who, although they could not speak the language, nevertheless came home from visits to the Soviet Union declaring that it represented the wave of the future.
Long before George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and others on the left realized the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union, West warned radicals that their blind belief in communism could only lead to the destruction of their own ideals. It is no wonder that West’s editor at the Daily Telegraph once called her the “sibyl of our time.”
CARL ROLLYSON
Oceanview, N.J.
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