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‘Coming to Terms with the Charm and Power of Soviet Communism’

The day of communism is done, in Europe at any rate. If Minerva's owl flies at dusk, we should now expect the appearance of works which, while conceived during the epoch of communism, have been given their sense and conclusions by the events of 1989–91. The three books considered here are the fruit not only of scholarly reflection but also of personal reconsiderations of the nature of Soviet communism. Each author recounts a story through which he has lived, with glances backwards to find the origins of an idea (in Walicki's case), an illusion (in Furet's) or a word (in Gleason's). The Marxist idea of freedom (Walicki), the appeal of the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals (Furet) and the definitions and uses of the term ‘totalitarianism’ (Gleason) are the avenues taken towards an understanding of the role of communism in this century, avenues which lead from the lives of the scholars in question. The degree of intellectual, and the kind of political, engagement with the idea of communism was different in each case, reflecting most notably the nationalities of these three historians.