Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes Under Western Eyes - 9780253067081

Unlike Western condemnations of Nazi atrocities, contemporary Western responses to Soviet crimes have often been ambiguous at best. While some public-opinion leaders 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, Dariusz Tolczyk contends, arose from a complex array of motives rooted in ideological biases, fears of empowering common enemies, outside political agendas, personal grounds, and business concerns. 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.

• | Author: Dariusz Tolczyk
• | Publisher: Indiana University Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 03, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 442 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0253067081
• | ISBN-13: 9780253067081