But timing was all. Intellectual critics of Communism had never been lacking; however their impact had for many decades been blunted by a widespread desire in Western Europe (and, as we have seen, in Eastern Europe through the 1960s) to find some silver lining, however dim, in the storm cloud of state socialism that had rolled across much of the continent since it first broke upon Russia in 1917. ‘Anti-Communism’, whatever its real or imputed motives, suffered the grievous handicap of appearing to challenge the shape of History and Progress, to miss the ‘bigger picture’, to deny the essential
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