Top Highlights

• THE SUBJECT OF THE ANTI-COMMUNIST MANIFESTOS is the role played by four unusually influential books in the great political struggle, usually called the Cold War,
• a conflict of competing social and political visions.
• the critique of Communism at the practical level was an interpretation of Soviet history and, in particular, an assessment of the degree to which the abstract theories of Marxist socialism were vindicated or repudiated in their concrete expressions within Soviet life.
• the Soviet authorities ran the real tourist agency—the famous Intourist—that organized all aspects of a visitor’s sojourn: transportation, lodging, meals, sightseeing; visits to the newly invented or radically reformed institutions of communal life: the factory, the school, the prison, the hospital, the farm.
• their enthusiasm for collectivist theory apparently blinded them to its actual practice in the Soviet Union of the 1930s,