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Blissful Blindness

Soviet Crimes Under Western Eyes
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Unlike their condemnations of Nazi atrocities, contemporary Western responses to Soviet crimes have often been ambiguous at best. While some leaders publicly denounced them, many others found reasons to dismiss wrongdoings and to consider Soviet propaganda more credible than survivors' accounts. Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes Under Western Eyes is a comprehensive exploration of Western responses to Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik revolution to the Soviet Union's final years. Ranging from denial, dismissal, and rationalization to outright glorification, these reactions, Darius Tolczyk contends, arose from a complex array of motives rooted in ideological biases, fears of empowering common enemies, and outside political agendas. Throughout the long history of the Soviet regime, Tolczyk traces its most heinous crimes-including the Red Terror, collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, the Great Terror, and mass deportations-and shows how Soviet propaganda, and an unmatched willingness to defer to it, minimized these atrocities within dominant Western public discourse. It would take decades for Western audiences to unravel the "big lie"-and even today, too many in both Russia and the West have chosen to forget the extent of Soviet atrocities, or of their nations' complicity. A fascinating read for those interested in the intricacies and obstructions of politics, Blissful Blindness traces Western responses to understand why, and how, the West could remain willfully ignorant of Soviet crimes.
Dariusz Tolczyk is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia. His books include See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience and Gulag w oczach Zachodu [The Gulag under Western eyes].
Introduction: Escape from Truth 1. Dreaming of Russia 2. Ex Oriente Lux 3. In the Soviet Theater of Life 4. Wonderland 5. Stalin Presents 6. A Black-and-White Western 7. The Curtain Falls, the Show Goes On 8. The Passing of an Illusion? Coda Bibliography Notes Index
Dariusz Tolczyk crafts a powerful argument about the dangers of treating truth as something malleable, as "an instrument of ideology and politics." - Francine Hirsch (Times Literary Supplement)
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