Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR

We have often been scornful of the layman’s ignorance and misunderstanding of Soviet affairs—and not without reason. The resting place of American views of Russia and communism is littered with the carcasses of incomprehension and misperception which, were they not so sad, would be funny. It has been a pathetic and perdurable obsession, ever since the dispatch in November 1917 that Lenin had died in Switzerland two years earlier and that the impostor who was taking over Petrograd was some unknown named Zederblum and the rhapsodic exclamations of those who “had seen the future” in Lenin’s Russia and found that “it works.”