Article: The fiddler's prerogative: J.W. Krutch and the "class wars".

Although it is now hard to fathom, the reaction of many Western intellectuals to the Russian Revolution was extremely positive. "I have been over into the future," Lincoln Steffens boasted, "and it works!" The Russian people and their leaders would not, he prophesied, succumb to the debilitating skepticism and despair that had gripped liberals in the West during the Great War. In fact, their malaise, according to Steffens, had nothing to do with the slaughter in the trenches but was merely symptomatic of bourgeois society at the end of its tether. "You see," he remarked after the death of John Reed (the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, whose sympathies for the ...

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