![]() ![]() “It is probably true, as some have argued, that sympathy for Leninism on the part of English and American liberal opinion in the twenties was swung by consideration of home politics. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.” The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. ![]() “With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces-poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on-had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. ![]()
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