Books, Arts & Manners: Uncovering Stalinism

Winter in Moscow, by Malcolm Mugger-idge (Eerdmans, 271 pp., $8.95)

Before there was Solzhenitsyn, or Pasternak, or Djilas, or Orwell, or Koestler, there was Muggeridge. He covered, or uncovered, the Soviet Union for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33, laying bare its stupendous horrors even as Walter Duranty and Claud Cockburn were dutifully retailing their obsequious lies about Stalin for American and English readers. He told the West about the Ukrainian famine, a feature of Stalin’s farm-collectivization program whose magnitude—on the order of 14 million deaths —is only now penetrating the consciousness.