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Type: Hardcover
Item#: C7392
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Four books that altered the course of history -- and the four fascinating men who wrote them
The Anti-Communist Manifestos
by John V. Fleming
The struggle of the Cold War had many aspects -- or
"fronts," as Communists called them -- but at its heart was
a conflict of competing social and political visions. So it
is not surprising that books proved one of the most potent
weapons in the anti-Communist arsenal. Now, in The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War,
John V. Fleming tells the fascinating story behind four
anti-Communist masterpieces -- Darkness at Noon (1940), by
Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian journalist and polymath
intellectual; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtin, a
German sailor and labor agitator; I Chose Freedom (1946),
by Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer; and Witness
(1952), by Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist.
(continued from above)
Although there had been many accounts, from the 1930s
on, of the scope and horror of crimes committed by the
Soviet Empire against its alleged enemies and ordinary
citizens, there was still, writes Fleming, "in the blighted
moral and political landscape of post-World War I Europe…a
broad consensus among intellectuals that 'capitalism' and
'imperialism' were bankrupt, and that the sole political
hope of the human race was 'socialism.'" The four works
discussed by Fleming -- all written by ex-Communists whose
bitter disillusionment led them to turn on their former
allegiance in literary fury -- had the scope and authority
to refute the idealistic vision of Soviet Communism. All
became bestsellers in America.
If these books altered the course of history, the
lives behind them have the dark fascination of fiction.
Koestler was imprisoned in three countries in as many
years. Kravchenko was forced to live like a fugitive in
America. Chambers was a prophet without honor in his own
land. Three of the four had been spies for the Comintern.
All contemplated suicide and two of them achieved it.
Revealing, scholarly, and compulsively readable, The
Anti-Communist Manifestos offers brilliant observations on
the nature of Stalinism, on the Spanish Civil War, and on
the whole period of the Cold War.
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