what did John Maynard Keynes think of the Soviet Union? This, from his A Short View of Russia:
Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartment of the soul--religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and conemputous because the business... is highly inefficient. Like other new religions, Leninism derives its power not from the multitude but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts, whose zeal and intolerance make each one the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists. Like other new religions it is led by those who can combine teh new spirit, perhaps sincerely, with seeing a good deal more than their followers, politicians with at leat an average dose of political cynicism who can smile as well as frown, volatile exporimentalists.... Like other new religions it actively persecutes without justice or pity.... But to say that Leninism is the faith of a persecuting and propagating minority of fanatics led by hypocrites is, after all, to say no more nor less than that it is a religion and not merely a party, and that Lenin a Mahomet not a Bismarck...
I sympathize with those who seek for something good in Soviet Russia. But when we come to the actual thing what is one to say? For me... Red Russia holds too much which is detestable.... How can I admire a policy which finds a characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every family and group at home?... How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete text-book [Marx] which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, whatever their faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values...
On the eonomic side I cannot perceive that Russian communism has made any contribution to our economic problems of intellectual interest or scientific value.... [W]e have everything to lose by the methods of violent change. In Western industrial conditions the tactics of Red Revolution would throw the entire population into a pit of poverty and death...
Yet the elation, when that is felt, is very great. Here--one feels at moments--in spite of poverty, stupidity, and oppression, is the laboratory of life. Here the chemicals are being mixed in new combinations, and stink and explode. Something--there is just a chance--might come out.... Russia will never matter seriously to the rest of us unless it be as a moral force. So, now the deeds are done and there is no going back, I should like to give Russia her chance; to help and not to hinder. For how much rather, even after allowing for everything, if I were a Russian would I contribute my quota of activity to Soviet Russia than to Tsarist Russia! I could not subscribe to the new official faith any more than to the old. I should detest the actions of the new tyrants not less than those of the old. But I should feel that my eyes were turned towards and no longer away from the possibilities of things; that out of the cruelty and stupidity of Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but beneath the cruelty and stupidity of New Russia some speck of the ideal may lie hid.
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