In America and other liberal democracies, Party members handed in their cards and quit. It turned out that the criticism had been true, all of it. The Soviet Union was no workers’ paradise at all but a workers’ slaughterhouse. The words of Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s foremost rival, came to mind: “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick.”
