Thread by @gtredoux

1. There is a common misconception, endlessly repeated today, that the communist fellow-travelers of the 1930s were naive well-intentioned people. That they were duped by the Soviets and fooled by Potemkin tours. If only they had been more careful! A leeetle more skeptical!

2. Examples given include George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, who certainly went on Potemkin tours of the USSR and made any number of dishonest remarks about the system they breezed through. This gets the history badly wrong. Intentionally so, because the reality stings far more.

3. The best way to see this is to consider the Webbs, Sydney and Beatrice, in more detail. In 1932 they produced a 2 volume panegyric to the USSR, The Soviet Union: a New Civilisation? It sold internationally in the tens of thousands, A second edition in 1936 dropped the "?".

4. The book was still being celebrated in left-wing circles well into the 1950s. My own copy of the '36 edition, originally from the Cornell University Library, was exceptionally well-read. Probably not with much skepticism in leafy Ithaca. Reading it is sobering.

5. There is nothing "naive" in it. The Ukraine famine? Never existed. No facts known. Perhaps not ideal nutritional circumstances everywhere, but no system is perfect. Political persecution? Vastly exaggerated. And necessary where it exists. Lucky are those who enjoy it.

6. Hundreds and hundreds of pages go on like this. Now the idea that this two-volume malefecarium was the product of naivete was heavily promoted by David Caute in his influential The Fellow Travellers. Others followed (so much "history" is just copying and repetition).

7. Beatrice Webb's private diaries, now published, show that the Webbs were both well-aware of the grim reality. She wondered why her in-law Malcolm Muggeridge had been so dense as to actually write about what he saw in the USSR. What did he expect as a reward?

8. But it is far far worse even than that. The Webbs passed their text to Ivan Maisky at the Soviet Embassy for "corrections". In reality, as a defector later testified to Congress, the text was improved at the Soviet foreign ministry back in Moscow. A laundering exercise.

9. In general the idea that the facts about the Gulag and the human carnage in the USSR were not known to the Western left is categorically false. In 1930 the Labour government actively worked to suppress information they were given, from myriad sources, including UK diplomats.

10. The Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman and others helped to cover it all up. Finland was bursting at the seams with prisoners who had escaped and given full details. British sailors loading timber in Russian ports had seen the Gulag in operation.

11. First-hand memoirs about the Gulag had been published, in English, since 1926. The Metro-Vickers engineers, British subjects, had been arrested and tortured to confess to ludicrous sabotage charges. But the Webbs had no sympathy for them: if they didn't like it, why go there?

12. That last argument takes some digesting. Note that the Webbs are buried in Westminster Abbey. Today one seldom hears about the small matter of laundering an internationally best-selling book on the behalf of a regime which murdered untold millions of people.

13. The University of London now organizes apology tours around its facilities for figures from the past some do not like (e.g. Flinders Petrie). But there is no mention of the Webbs in these bizarre rituals. Instead the LSE website writes cloyingly about their romance.

14. One would think that the influence of the Fabians means that these topics have now been exhaustively studied. The opposite is true: radio silence. As Beatrice Webb told her diary about Muggeridge: why go digging into all that? What do you expect to find if you do?

*Soviet Communism: a New Civilisation. But who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?