The following is a brief excerpt from Johnson's book, the best introduction to this important period I have seen. Not to put too fine a point on it, this book is superb, and every citizen of a democracy should consider it essential reading. Certainly every High School student in the U.S. and Canada should be required to read it.
"In the outside world, the magnitude of the Stalin tyranny -- indeed its very existence — was scarcely grasped at all. Most of those who travelled to Russia were either businessmen, anxious to trade and with no desire to probe or criticize what did not concern them, or intellectuals who came to admire and, still more, to believe. If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot -- and his crimes -- so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. Thus, Amabel Williams-Ellis wrote an introduction to a book about the building of the White Sea Canal, later so harrowingly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which contains the sentence: `This tale of accomplishment of a ticklish engineering job, in the middle of primaeval forests, by tens of thousands of enemies of the state, helped — or should it be guarded? — by only thirty-seven OGPU officers, is one of the most exciting stories that has ever appeared in print.’ Sidney and Beatrice Webb said of the same project: `It is pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration.’ Harold Laski praised Soviet prisons for enabling convicts to lead `a full and self-respecting life'; Anna Louise Strong recorded: `The labour camps have won a high reputation throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed.’ ‘So well-known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings', she added, `that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.’ Whereas in Britain, wrote George Bernard Shaw, a man enters prison a human being and emerges a criminal type, in Russia he entered `as a criminal type and would come out an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to come out at all. As far as I could make out they could stay as long as they liked.‘
The famine of 1932, the worst in Russian history, was virtually unreported. At the height of it, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found `a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England'. Shaw threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier `convinced that there were no shortages in Russia'. `Where do you see any food shortage?' he asked, glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metropole. He wrote: `Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take off my hat to him accordingly.' But Shaw and his travelling companion, Lady Astor, knew of the political prisoners, since the latter asked Stalin for clemency on behalf of a woman who wished to join her husband in America (Stalin promptly handed her over to the OGPU) and she asked him, `How long are you going to go on killing people?' When he replied `As long as necessary', she changed the subject and asked him to find her a Russian nurserymaid for her children."
Paul Johnson -- A History of the Modern World (Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 1983), pp. 275,6.
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