Neal Stephenson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years. Why is it, in your view — having come to grips with the topic — that so many American intellectuals became infatuated with Stalinism? Not just agnostic, but positively enthusiastic. This often survived their visits to the Soviet Union. How did that happen? Are we just, as humans, deranged beings? I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the main character in Polostan is a daughter of a Russian dad and an American woman who are both very involved in leftist politics in the late teens, early ’20s. There were a lot of, not just Americans, but Westerners in general, who went to the Soviet Union in those years because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great. This was obviously before Stalinism and all that, but even then, there were all kinds of bad stuff going on. The Cheka, the precursor of the KGB, was coming into power and doing bad things. If you had the eyes to see it, you could see that this was going in a bad direction, but a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and closed their eyes to it. There’s a great book by Malcolm Muggeridge. I think it’s called Winter in Moscow, which he wrote in, I think, 1933. It’s fictionalized, but it’s a thinly veiled account of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early ’30s. Muggeridge has been there, and he knows bad things are happening. He knows about the man-made famine in Ukraine, probably knows about a lot of other things. He’s depicting these Western expats who just refuse to acknowledge any downside to the revolution. There are plenty of stories like that from that era. I don’t know if it means that we’re deranged. I think we want to see nice things happen in the world. If we’ve decided that there’s a particular political movement or ideology that’s going to make nice things happen, then it’s a little too easy for us to deceive ourselves about the downside of such movements. What is it about the Soviet Union that you have ended up most admiring?…

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