> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.