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A subtle, nuanced, but gripping study of the most pervasive and destructive illusion of the 20th century, that of the virtues of communism. This book by the late Furet, a member of the Academie Francaise, and scholar of the French Revolution, and himself a former Communist, has already been translated into more than a dozen languages. In it he tries to grapple with the paradox of the wide admiration for a regime like that of the Soviet Union, manifestly unfree, economically unsuccessful, and unprecedentedly brutal toward its people. He finds the basis for its appeal in its seeming promise of human equality but even more in the disillusionment created by the First World War, from which National Socialism also received its impetus. Indeed, he finds that communism and Nazism fed off each other and even suggests that Stalin, who admired Hitler's ruthlessness, learnt a lesson from the Night of the Long Knives, during which Hitler purged the stormtroopers. Most of all, communism benefited from being seen as the sole anticapitalist, antifascist force. Its universality can be understood by its appeal even to the reformist British intelligentsia. Most surprising of all was the bland indifference of Western intellectuals to the monstrous cruelty of the terror. It was only when the terror had largely subsided, and when the Pastemaks and the Solzhenitsyns were merely being gagged and harassed rather than executed, that intellectuals protested. The end came, in Furet's view, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, which brought into question the two wellsprings of the Soviet regime: ideology and terror. Most ironic of all, Furet suggests, is the paucity of interest shown by European intellectuals in the virtues of the American system of government. Furet devotes himself almost entirely to Europe, and the book, for all its vitality, is not easy reading. But there are few books that deal so well or with such subtlety with the opiate of the closing century's intellectuals. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Deborah Furet is François Furet's widow and frequent translator and works at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

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