cover image Retreat from the Finland Station: Moral Odysseys in the Breakdown of Communism

Retreat from the Finland Station: Moral Odysseys in the Breakdown of Communism

Kenneth Murphy. Free Press, $24.95 (415pp) ISBN 978-0-02-922315-4

In a tour de force of historical analysis, Murphy charts the decline and fall of the communist creed through searching, brilliant profiles of a dozen true believers who became disillusioned with their faith. Beginning with Bolshevik theoretician Nicolai Bukharin, murdered in a Stalinist purge, he goes on to consider Mayakovsky's suicide, Solzhenitsyn's expose of the gulag, and the disillusionment of Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide and Ignazio Silone. The heresies of Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, Hungarian reformer Imre Nagy, of Czech leader Alexander Dubcek, and of Khrushchev (who condemned Stalin's crimes) reveal early fissures in the communist monolith that has since cracked wide open. Murphy, a former staff writer for the Economist , brings the story full circle with Yeltsin's dismantling of the socialist order. Tracing the self-corruption of intellectuals blinded by faith, this study is a worthy sequel to Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. (July)