Name: The God that Failed
ISBN: 9780231123952

Richard Howard Stafford Crossman

This classic work and crucial document of the Cold War brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and Louis Fischer, on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world.

The God that Failed

Gavin

The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (1949) by Silone, Koestler, Fischer, Gide, Wright, and Spender. 

Remarkable accounts of conversion by the most independent, earliest ex-Communists. From where we stand, it's easy to downplay the conversions - because, well, "obviously Stalinism was fucked" - but many of the most brilliant people kept clinging on to it through Kronstadt, through Pitchfork, through the Volksaufstand, through Hungary, through Prague, and even today (Carr never acknowledged the genocides; Hobsbawm knew the death tolls and kept betting on red; Grover Furr is still teaching) 
  even in Russia
. 

  

  Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree.


Foreword, by a peculiarly intellectual MP (by today's standards), is careful to set itself apart from the red-bashing of the time and lay out its humane purpose: to understand the emotional appeal of communism (: a religious one) and the disillusionment that the very most independent communists had already suffered. 

  no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one... The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom.



Silone's testimony about the Comintern's sick irrationality would be enough to make the book prescient. Richard Wright's account of the fucked-up parties outside Russia is another really chilling bit: the rot was deep and wide. This was my great-grandfather's copy. 


(Form warning: Arthur Koestler was himself a monstrous man.)

The God that Failed

Reviews

Highlights