We Are Not Safe and Never Will Be

There are many stories from the late 1930s of European and American intellectuals being taken on stage-managed tours of the Soviet Union, nearly all of them returning to their home countries with glowing reviews of what they had seen. An exception was the novelist Andre Gide’s account, Back from the USSR, where he claimed that artistic and other freedoms were in even worse shape there than in Hitler’s Germany.

In one of the most remarkable comments I’ve ever come across, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir recalled the impact of Gide’s book on her own circle of Communists: “We had never imagined the USSR to be a paradise, but we had also never seriously questioned the construction of socialism. It was inconvenient to be required to do so at the very moment that we felt disgusted by the policies of the democracies. Was there nowhere on earth where we…