Some people, writes Dalrymple, hope for a
a proper communist revolution, purified of deformations such as those of Stalin and Mao.
This, he says, is
about as realistic a hope as mine of one day playing cricket for England.
These people believe that, until the advent of Stalin, the Russian revolution was a good thing, to be emulated. But of course
attempts to put everything right at once by implementation of petty intellectual schemes are fraught with danger, and have a history of mass slaughter.
The answer, Dalrymple believes, must lie in the psychology of religion.
When religious faith is replaced by a philosophy that prides itself on its rationality, it soon turns religious in the worst possible sense. It becomes an atheist theocracy.
He points out that
everything was known about the Soviet Union from the first. It is not true that Solzhenitsyn revealed anything to the West that was not, or could not have been, known before.
A very large number of books of various genres, from essays to histories to memoirs to novels and short stories,
exposed the viciousness of Bolshevism from the very first, a viciousness that anyone with any imagination could have anticipated from Lenin’s literary style alone.
Leninist viciousness
was a new and more thoroughgoing type that acted on the mind as a virus on a computer. (Viciousness, actual and potential, is a constant of human history because of our flawed nature.)
Solzhenitsyn
was right about the difference between Macbeth, who from personal ambition killed people, but only a few, and the ideologically motivated mass killings of the Soviet Union and elsewhere, the difference being in the effect of ideology.
What was different about Solzhenitsyn, apart from his literary talent, was that Western intellectuals
were now prepared to believe what he said, whereas shortly before, they had rejected as propaganda evidence of a very similar nature produced by others.
