Malcolm Muggeridge's Winter in Moscow is a Rare Treasure...And In More Ways Than One

Winter in Moscow is the remarkably enlightening and controversial novel written by Malcolm Muggeridge was based on his experiences in Russia during 1932 and 1933 while serving as the newspaper correspondent for the left-leaning Manchester Guardian.

Michael D. Aeschliman, in his introduction to the 1987 edition (now, like all other copies, long out of print) describes the book’s origins and impact:

“The belief in an inevitable, collective human progress grew to dominate ‘enlightened’ Western opinion more and more steadily from the time of Bacon in the 17th Century, through the propagandastic and revolutionary writing of the French philosophers and their Jacobin and socialist successors in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, as Hannah Arendt has written, it ‘became an almost universally accepted dogma.’ ‘Glory to Man in the highest!’ wrote the poet A.C. Swinburne expressing the characteristic optimism and the Utopian expectations of his era…”

As a humanist and Fabian socialist Muggeridge shared this naive idealism and, like many intellectuals of his time, looked to the Soviet Union as a key development in this movement of social progress. But his experiences in Russia tore that idealism apart and, rare among his breed, he dared to see through the irrationality, the lies, the extreme cruelty, and the utter hypocrisy of Communism. He came back telling the truth…and was quickly vilified for doing so.

But Aeschliman points out that Muggeridge didn’t just lose a philosophy, he also gained a fervent new belief. He finally believed in something real. “That ‘something’ was the reality of evil...and the willing collaboration with it by legions of adulatory liberal and socialist intellectuals was something that would never cease to astonish and appall him, and would never cease to inspire his pen to some of the sharpest, most powerful moral satire ever written in our language.”

Now I must tell you that Winter in Moscow is a very hard book to get hold of. I discovered one of only a handful of copies that are available through the interlibrary loan program and, when it came it was in really delicate condition. But I treated the book with great care and the content of the book with even greater care, respect, and appreciation. I would suggest that with all the loose talk going around about socialism nowadays, making the effort to find a copy (don’t worry about buying one -- the cheapest copy I could find through the internet was over $100 -- is still well worth the effort.