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Winter in Moscow

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Malcolm Muggeridge, a confirmed life-long Fabian, went to Moscow as a journalist to realize his dream of studying first-hand the wonders of this political-economic dictatorship that the NY Times correspondent had called "The Future". ("We have seen the future and it works!")

In a very short period, Muggeridge, an intelligent, politically savvy man, saw through the propaganda which hid to the world the all-pervading Terror, the economic disaster, the assasinations, the rape and thievery of the country's riches, the hunger-induced cannibalism, and the mountains of cadavers, all of this savagery carried out by a chosen few, who saw nothing wrong with the way that they, who controlled it all, were taking over and destroying the country, for their exclusive benefit.

Muggeridge saw legions of foreign, leftist radicals who were taking advantage of the real Russians, who were starving; he saw as well other regiments of "useful-idiots" who gained little from the cruel experiment, but rejoiced in the mystic "values" that they saw, which obscured to them the grim reality of the disaster that was taking place.

The book is historical fiction. Muggeridge tried to counter the damage to Freedom caused by the admiration of the cuckolded Western press, either seduced by what they did not understand or afraid for what might happen one day, should this perverted, absurd experiment that was Communism, triumph. To do so, from his lone position of weakness, against the clamor of socialists and internationalists who still today constitute the nucleus of the editors and managers who run what we erroneously believe is a free press, he was forced to trivialize what he saw, trying to achieve small gains for the truth, rather than be overwhelmed and steam-rollered by the lying leviathan.

That Muggeridge saw nothing trivial about the rape of a nation, is obvious by what he did upon his return to England and what his life became, after the highly educational, but terrifying experience he had just lived through. He immediately left the Fabian organizations he had belonged to all of his life; a politically-confirmed atheist, he became a Catholic; he gave speeches and explained to anyone who would listen to him, the evils of Communism; he wrote several books and tracts against this menace - although his voice was almost lost amidst the din of the Media, fawning all over itself to present favorably the lies and exaggerations of the communist savages, who had then, and retain today, certain elements of chic adored by those amongst us who enjoy every degeneracy that today has become "politically correct".

Mr.Muggeridge did his very best, with the meager tools he had been given, to staunch the flow of irrational propaganda that promised to flood the world to bring about Lenin's dreams of a world under the specter of communism, leading to the eventual liquidation of all religion, the eradication of ethics and morality, the removal of patriotism, and the assassination of anyone who dared oppose this universal Genocide - the worst ever perpetrated in all of history.

Unfortunately, our increasingly uneducated masses would not have understood the magnitude of the threat. Muggeridge was forced to feed us all the information piece-meal, diluted enough to be comprehensible for the average reader. He was not being silly; he was being intelligent and by measuring his words, making what small gains he could to an uncomprehending public.

This book was ahead of its time in revealing the true nature of the Bolsheviks and those that implemented its horrors as never seen before in history.Much of what Muggeridge revealed was verified in the many publications of late from those authors in Yale University Press'Annals of Communism Series'.
Ironic how so little exposure these revelations have had in our media.

One of the few journalists to clearly see--and honestly report--conditions in Stalin's Russia was Malcolm Muggeridge, whose novel, Winter in Moscow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's Publishing Co., c. 1987; first published in 1934 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London), was based upon his observations as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932 and 1933. Reared in a socialist home, married to the niece of Beatrice Webb (an eminent socialist who routinely praised and defended the Bolsheviks), Muggeridge arrived in Russia with great expectations, confident he'd find the dreams of himself and his father fully fulfilled. He even considered becoming a Russian citizen and devoting the rest of his life to the socialist cause. But he'd barely arrived before he was overwhelmed with the reality of what had happened, the misery of the "workers' paradise," the illusions of Marxist slogans. So instead of writing an encomium to the endeavor, he drafted one of the most searing indictments of the Soviet system written in his era. In his introduction to this edition, Michael D. Aeshliman notes that "A.J.P. Taylor, one of the finest English historians of our time, wrote in 1965 that this novel was `probably the best book ever written on Soviet Russia'" (p. vii).
The novel is loosely structured around a corps of English visitors' and journalists' activities in Russia. Representative of the thousands of "political pilgrims" who toured the country was a woman, a devout feminist, who was delighted "to find that so many things she believed in had been put into practice--co-education, sex equality, humane slaughterer, family allowances, communal kitchens" etc. (p. 24). Another, an Anglican clergyman, "by nature mild and gentle," who had no faith in either the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Virgin Birth he officially upheld, sought a better world in Russia and agonized over the "intolerance and cruelty" so amply evident under Stalin's rule, but he took comfort in the fact that every home "had its wireless, and its gramophone, and its shelves of revolutionary literature" (p. 38). Coming to Russia for a brief visit, knowing what they wanted to see and seeing what the tour guides chose to show them, they generally returned home with glowing testimonials for the communist system.
Western journalists too gave Stalin support. They were epitomized by a man Muggeridge called "Jefferson"--clearly the celebrated, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who (while millions of peasants died) merely acknowledged that there was "'a shortage of some districts'" that might in "'certain very rare'" cases be called "'a famine. But, as I said in a piece I sent a few days ago, you can't make omelettes without cracking eggs'" (p. 90). Years later, Muggeridge would say that Duranty was "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism" (p. xix). Evaluating another journalist, who solemnly praised Duranty, Muggeridge said: "The old man embodied in himself the character of his age. He was the decadence of European civilization getting a last sensation out of the establishment of Asiatic barbarism in Russia. Lines on his face traced out a record of the world to which he belonged. Co-education in creases round his nose. Votes for women wrinkling his forehead. Pacifism the slobber of his lips" (p. 93). He was, in short, "bloated, inflated, but with no core" (p. 93).
One of the characters, Wilfred Pye, representing Muggeridge, "had a simple mind" and went to Russia intent on finding the truth. "Obviously, Pye thought, I must see where people eat; how they eat, and what they eat" (p. 127). He'd always sided with the poor and dispossessed, and Bolshevism seemed to him a fully admirable movement. "It was the future; hated by all save the far-seeing and the pure of heart; hated by all save Pye and his great English Liberal newspaper" (p. 128). To him the helpless were always righteous, the impoverished were always victims, and the pursuit of justice required the transformation of society. He was proud of standing up for the "weak and oppressed, [and] when he looked at a map it was not countries he saw, but wrongs sprawling across five continents" (p. 128).
Arriving in Russia expecting to find a paradise, Muggeridge had to do little more than stroll about Moscow to see its refutation. "He saw hunger everywhere" and wondered how the Dictatorship of the Proletariat could feed him and Western journalists while allowing masses of Russians to go hungry. Determined to see more of the country, he traveled extensively and discovered, to his horror, that famine was everywhere and, worse yet, "it was organized from within" (p. 138). Peasants were dying in what had once been the bread basket of Russia, and it was clearly an officially-orchestrated starvation of the people. As Pye analyzed it, he realized that: "Marxism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat's religion, is the most urban religion that has ever existed. It was born in underground printing presses, in dingy lodgings and cafes and hotels. Its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless" (p. 138). In the deepest sense, the Bolsheviks warred against the "earth; with the nature of things and people; with life itself, that their embodiment involves" (p. 139). In the service of an abstract ideology, Marxists easily denied both God and Reality and sought to destroy all created goods that challenged their agenda.
Muggeridge rapidly discarded his illusions in the face of the monumental evils he witnessed. One of his characters finally concluded: "Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out. It was a vision of Good and Evil. Heaven and Hell. Life and death. There were two alternatives; and he had to choose. He chose" (p. 226). He chose to deal honestly with reality rather than blind himself with ideological rhetoric, to tell the truth rather than toe the party line. Walking about the decaying city of Moscow, he realized that the "litter of ideas in his own mind was the litter of ideas outside. Rootless, unreligious ideas. What a blight they had been! Piling up into shadows whose darkness cloaked a reversion to savagery. Piling up into a Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (p. 232). Under the Bolsheviks utopia had triumphed, consummating "all the dingy hopes that have echoed and re-echoed over Europe for a century" (p. 234).
When he tried to publish what he saw in Russia, his articles were disbelieved and he was called a liar. The Guardian fired him and when he returned to England he was blacklisted and virtually unemployable! Only celebrations of Stalin were allowed! But Winter in Moscow was published and remains for us one of the few truthful descriptions of what life was really like in those years.

If you are a student of the October Revolution, and it's aftermath, then this book should be read by you. He was there in Moscow, and saw the hypocrisy and madness that resulted from the Bolshevik's social engineering. There is an insight contained here that is missing from the writings of Lenin's useful idiots.

I bought this because it was mentioned in the introduction to a book by Wassily Grossman (the author of Life and Fate, one of the great books of the 20th century).
I was initially disappointed that it was fictionalized, and that I am not familiar enough with the figures of the time to have the fun of identifying them,
but it turned out to be a very good and easy read. It is a bit depressing knowing the lack of influence it had, an extraordinarily searing account of the repressions of Lenin and Stalin, the architects of the murders of millions. Most of the authors' disgust is really for the Western fellow travellers, the "useful idiots", some of whom unfortunately remain. I presume this is not actually stocked by Amazon (a form of censorship) because the author clearly has considerable distaste for the Russian and German Jews who he implicates as both participants and beneficiaries of the October "revolution".

This book was written in 1934 but it is still one of my favorites...Malcolm Muggeridge is one of my favorite authors...

So I was a little dissappointed that "Winter in Moscow" was a fictionalized account based on Muggeridge time in Russia in the early 30's. The characters mostly foreign reporters & writers are witness to the transformation of an entire society from a feudal state to the world first Communist nation. They are a sorry lot. This is a group that Muggeridge despises yet he was one of them. They enjoyed their life of privledge & luxury while mouthing the glories of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". They were either hypocrites or incredibly ignorant. It is however a reporter's story of the terror & hell that was Stalin's Russia circa 1932. Muggeridge was there.