Lenin and His Entourage Advertised Themselves as Marxists and Many Western Scholars Thought of the Soviet Experiment as an Effort to Realize the Marxist Dream of Equality and Peace

That a "Marxist" revolution would occur, in whatever circumstances, in a primitive economic environment, characterized more by peasant life than by proletarian consciousness, did not seem to puzzle very many Western thinkers. Many were clearly disposed, as was John Reed, to see the Bolshevik revolution as a signal of an imminent universal Marxist revolution. V.I. Lenin and his entourage did advertise themselves as Marxists--defenders of the proletariat--and a surprising number of Western scholars continued for seven decades to think of the Soviet experiment as an effort to realize the Marxist dream of equality and peace. There is no other way to explain the admiration with which Western intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, Syndney and Beatrice Webb, André Gide, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, or Howard Fast studied the Soviet revolution.

What this contributed to was a systematic difference in the scholarly employment of the two concepts, fascism and communism. References to fascism were almost always mercurial and fugitive and almost invariably carried moral opprobrium in their train. For the half-century after the end of the Second World War, the term fascism, almost without exception, was used to designate "pathological" political phenomena. Fascists and fascism were consistently spoken of as "narcissistic and megalomaniac," as well as "sadistic, necrophiliac" and "psychopathological."

"Marxist," "Marxist-Leninist," or "communist" systems, on the other hand, were rarely treated with such unqualified condemnation. Early in the history of the Soviet Union, E.H. Carr could argue that V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin really sought to increase "the sum of well-being and human opportunity" through achievements that "impressed the rest of the world."

Even when such systems were convincingly identified with purges, mass murder, and pandemic political violence, they were rarely deemed "psychopathological" or "sadistic." As late as 1984, Norman Mailer could still lament the treatment of the Soviet Union as an "evil force," and others refused to acknowledge that political terror might function in some intrinsic fashion in the communist systems of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Kim Il Sung. For a very long time, there was an abiding sense, among many Western intellectuals, that the Soviet Union was no more "evil" than the United States.

--A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 2.