Unlike their condemnations of Nazi atrocities, contemporary Western responses to Soviet crimes have often been ambiguous at best. While some leaders publicly denounced them, many others found reasons to dismiss wrongdoings and to consider Soviet propaganda more credible than survivors' accounts.

Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes Under Western Eyes is a comprehensive exploration of Western responses to Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik revolution to the Soviet Union's final years. Ranging from denial, dismissal, and rationalization to outright glorification, these reactions, Darius Tolczyk contends, arose from a complex array of motives rooted in ideological biases, fears of empowering common enemies, and outside political agendas. Throughout the long history of the Soviet regime, Tolczyk traces its most heinous crimes-including the Red Terror, collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, the Great Terror, and mass deportations-and shows how Soviet propaganda, and an unmatched willingness to defer to it, minimized these atrocities within dominant Western public discourse. It would take decades for Western audiences to unravel the "big lie"-and even today, too many in both Russia and the West have chosen to forget the extent of Soviet atrocities, or of their nations' complicity.

A fascinating read for those interested in the intricacies and obstructions of politics, Blissful Blindness traces Western responses to understand why, and how, the West could remain willfully ignorant of Soviet crimes.

About the Author

Dariusz Tolczyk is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. He is author of See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience and of Gulag w oczach Zachodu (The Gulag Under Western Eyes). He is editor (with Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and John Radzilowski) of Poland's Transformation: A Work in Progress.

Reviews

"Inasmuch as we live in an age of historical amnesia, this book seeks to critically assess how and in what ways the crimes of the Soviet period were absolved or denied or abetted by Western political analysts, journalists, political actors of the Right and the Left, fellow travelers, members and non-members of the Communist parties."-George O. Liber, author of Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954

"Dariusz Tolczyk crafts a powerful argument about the dangers of treating truth as something malleable, as "an instrument of ideology and politics."-Francine Hirsch, Times Literary Supplement

Book Information
ISBN 9780253067098
Author Dariusz Tolczyk
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press