The Book No Socialist Dares Read - Watchman Research Media

WHEN a visitor to the Soviet Union returned to his home country, he declared: ‘I have seen the future, and it works’. While this sounds as though it could have come from the numerous British socialists who made the pilgrimage to the USSR during the 1930s, it was in fact uttered by an American investigative journalist called Lincoln Steffens.

He made the remark in 1919, after returning from Petrograd. According to his biography, Steffens was put up in a heated palace with servants, from which he ventured, stepping over emaciated corpses in the streets, to observe the starving local inhabitants at work in a communist society.

Of this, he wrote: ‘Soviet Russia was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan‘ and that the dreadful conditions were ‘a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan’. Meanwhile the Red Terror was in full swing. Steffens had willingly mistaken a ‘boot stamping on a human face for ever’ for a future that works.

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