Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women beyond Stalin’s grasp were most seduced by the man and his cult. It was the absurdly large gap separating rhetoric from reality that made it so irresistible to men and women of goodwill in search of a Cause.10 Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale. Raymond Aron in 1950 remarked upon ‘the ludicrous surprise . . . that the European Left has taken a pyramid-builder for its God.’ But was it really so surprising? Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, was most attracted to the Communists at precisely the moment when the ‘pyramid-builder’ was embarking upon his final, crazed projects. The idea that the Soviet Union was engaged upon a momentous quest whose very ambition justified and excused its shortcomings was uniquely attractive to rationalist intellectuals. The besetting sin of Fascism had been its parochial objectives. But Communism was directed towards impecca...