The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union

by Walter Laquer, Walter Laqueur

Release Date: March, 1996

Edition: Paperback

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The jury is still out.

It was a dream that almost from its humble start turned into a bloody nightmare, and it did fail, but it's too soon to declare that as if Communism were not poised for acomeback in the former Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe. If it does come back we may not get to see, at least for a while, its inevitable Stalinist face, with gulags, forced labor, terror, and wholesale murder of political and class enemies. But that will happen in time and with a former KGB man running things in Moscow and ex-Communists back in power in the "Near Abroad" and Eastern Europe, any epitaphs about Communism are in too early. Walter Laqueur says this much in his analysis, but the title of his book is a bit misleading. There are plenty of Communists out there and the ideology is attractive to a lot of people from very different backgrounds, so a resurgent Russia that swallows the Near Abroad and "protects" Eastern Europe is a very real possibility.

This is a good book, but you must be prepared to go to the Notes pages constantly. By far the best part is the author's exposure of the so-called "experts" from the West who got it so wrong regarding the Soviet Union, not only about its implosion (they are not clairvoyants, after all), but in their total analysis of the system. Laqueur presents most of these experts as what they are: ideologically-motivated men and women of the Left that could not bring themselves to see the rotten system they were supposedly studying. When they saw the truth, they camouflaged it or ignored it because they were attracted to such a system.

I was disappointed in the exclusion of Dmitri Volkogonov and the very brief mention of Roy Medvedev from among the Soviet scholars who seriously attempted to bring light to a very dark subject. Of especial consideration is the case of Volkogonov, whose biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky leave no doubt that the troika in whose hands rested the destiny of millions in Russia and beyond was a corrupt, power-hungry confluence of liars, murderers, and fanatics. Laqueur ignores Volkogonov. Almost equally ignored is Robert Conquest, barely mentioned in a rather vague form. Perhaps the author wanted to concentrate on the lousy ones, like Getty, Fitzpatrick, Lewin, Sanders, and others. Still, honorable mentions to those who courageously wrote the truth and were right about how bad Communism (in all its variants: Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist) really was would have been a valuable epilogue.

In spite of these minor problems, this is a highly recommended book, especially to use as a guide in order to detect the so-called fellow travellers (Lenin called them "Useful Idiots) like Carr and Deutscher, or the inexcusably bad ones for being apologists, like Brand, Schlesinger, Ward, Davies, etc. Also, for those interested in the subject, an article by Robert Conquest for the "Times Literary Supplement" of London and reproduced by the "National Review" of July 15, 1996, is very good additional material. In it, Mr. Conquest has one or two things to say about Robert W. Thurston's book on Stalin "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941." I would suggest reading Laqueur's book first, and then Conquest's article.

A story of political self-deception and failure.

"The Dream That Failed" is an insightful book about what went wrong in the Soviet Union, or perhaps better, a wrong idea that was doomed to failure. Walter Laqueur deftly points out the political self-deception of the Soviet political system and the failure of the system to adapt to changing times or ever recognize the change before it was too late. The most interesting insight in the book is the analysis of Western "experts" on the Soviet Union. Most appeared to more caught up in the deceptions and failures, and still are, than the Soviet government. My only criticisms: the book is a little hard to read. The complexity of the sentence structure frequently requires breaking the sentences down into their components to keep from getting lost. The syntax also comes across as somewhat affected. Over all a very good book, well worth the effort.