In the eyes of the Western intelligentsia, the world economic crisis transformed the Soviet Union, the land of the five-year plan, into a paradise on earth. Arthur Koestler, who visited the Soviet Union in 1932—33 and wrote about it with the same enthusiasm as all the other Western writers, journalists, and businessmen, made the following remark much later, when he was settling his scores with the past in his autobiography: "If history itself had been a supporter of communism, it would not have been able to synchronize so perfectly the gravest crisis of the Western world and the first phase of the Russian industrial revolution. The contrast was so strong that it inevitably led to this conclusion: they are the future, we are the past."101 Soviet planning was contrasted to the chaos of the Western economy, and the absence of unemployment in the Soviet Union to the millions of unemployed in the West.
The term iron curtain came into general use after Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Goebbels had used it before Churchill, but the first to do so "was the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov in 1917: "With a clank, a squeal, and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history. The show is over. The audience has risen from its seats. It is time for people to put on their coats and go home. They look around. There are no more coats and no more homes."102 To Rozanov, the iron curtain was the revolution, which interrupted the course of Russian history. The term was used in the same sense in 1921 by an emigr6 writer named Polyakov.
Soviet propagandists also used the term, but in a different sense. In 1930, an article entitled "The Iron Curtain" appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta. Its author, Lev Nikulin, began with these words:
When there is a fire on the stage, the stage is separated from the auditorium by an iron curtain. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, there is a conflagration in Soviet Russia that has lasted for twelve years in a row. Pulling on the ropes with all their might, they have tried to lower the curtain little by little, so that the fire does not spread to the orchestra pit.103
A fire had indeed been raging in the Soviet Union. By 1930 it had devoured millions of people, but the West knew nothing about it—the West did not want to know. The end of the NEP and the coming of the "Great Change" meant, in particular, the end of all connections with the outside world that were not totally monitored by the authorities. Unsupervised contacts had still been possible in the latter half of the 1920s.
The Soviet Union's isolation from the rest of the world was possible only through the complicity of the West. It was not difficult to isolate the Soviet people: the strictest censorship, no more individual trips abroad, no correspondence with foreigners or conversations with them, and incessant propaganda. Koestler was rather surprised by the questions he, a German Communist, was asked by the Soviet people concerning the situation in the West:
"When you left the bourgeois Press was your ration card withdrawn and were you kicked out at once from your room?" "What is the average number per day of French working class families starving to death (a) in rural areas, (b) in the towns?" "By what means have our comrades in the West succeeded in temporarily staving off the war of intervention which the finance-capitalists are preparing with the aid of the Social Fascist traitors?"104
Koestler added that these questions were always asked, the same ones in every town he visited, and that they were asked in neo-Russian, "Dzhu- gashvilian" language (Stalin's original name was Dzhugashvili).
The ignorance of the Soviet people was the result of the combined efforts of the "organs" and the propaganda machine. But the scores of books, the hundreds and hundreds of articles written about the Soviet Union by French, German, English, and American democrats, liberals, and conservatives who had been authorized to travel in the land that was building socialism reinforced the iron curtain from the Western side by not allowing people in the West to learn the truth about the Soviet Union.
Journalists who had lived for a long time in the Soviet Union, such as Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, participated in the deception. Their reasons varied widely: a desire not to offend the Soviet authorities, fear of being considered "unobjective," a desire to promote their own government's policies. Western correspondents concealed, distorted, and interpreted the facts falsely. It was with their help that the monstrous extent of the famine of 1931—1933 was concealed from the world.
Many Western intellectuals saw the October revolution as the dawn of a new era. To them the Great Depression of the 1930s signaled the end of Western civilization. They believed that the Soviet Union represented a joyous tomorrow for all mankind. "I have seen the future and it works," declared Lincoln Steffens, an influential American journalist and true friend of the Soviet Union. The eminent British Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? They answered the question in no uncertain terms. It was a new civilization.105 "I have never eaten so well as during my trip to the Soviet Union," announced the famous master of paradox Bernard Shaw, who visited the country of the future at the height of the famine. On the eve of his departure he entered the following in the visitor's book at Moscow's Metropol Hoteclass="underline" 'Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair."106 Ella Winter, an American who was in the Soviet Union in 1932, spoke of certain momentary "difficulties" in terms of labor pains: "Is a woman happy bearing the long-awaited child? They are giving birth to a new world, a new world outlook, and in this process questions of personal gratification become secondary."107 After traveling in the Soviet Union in 1934, the Labourite Harold Laski announced: "Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime."108
Arthur Koestler explained the thought process he went through on his visit to the Soviet Union to gather materials for an enthusiastic book about the land of socialism. He reasoned dialectically. The standard of living was low, but it had been lower under the tsars. The workers lived better in the capitalist countries, but their situation was growing worse, while in the Soviet Union workers' conditions were improving.
The main argument in the minds of all Western devotees of the new society was that things would be different when the revolution came in their own country. This was the reasoning of French, English, and Americans alike. Edmund Wilson, the influential American literary critic, even proposed in an "Appeal to Progressives" that they "take communism out of the hands of the Communists" in order to build it themselves.109 In the Soviet Union, he wrote, "I felt as though I was in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining."110
The enthusiastic international campaign by intellectual "friends of the Soviet Union" rendered enormous practical service to Stalin's country. Public opinion was won over. A New York travel bureau recruited workers for the Soviet Union with publicity like this: "Come to Soviet Russia. Intellectuals and workers of every profession, both men and women, are cordially invited to Soviet Russia... where the greatest social experiment in the world is taking place, amidst a myriad of colorful nationalities, marvelous scenery, splendid architecture, and exotic civilizations."111 Largely influenced by public opinion, the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, after establishing close economic and cultural ties with it.