Retreat from the Finland Station: Moral Odysseys in the Breakdown of Communism

by Kenneth Murphy

In 1940, Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, a study of the growth of the idea of communism. This book examines the lives of such men as Bukharin, Koestler, Gide, Diljas, Silone and Dubcek, and describes the self-deception and despair of those who embraced and recoiled from communism. Murphy argues that the self-deception of the communist is not merely a product of circumstance, but integral to the very idea itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029223156
• ISBN13: 9780029223154
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 415 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Readable with keen insights

I have read a few books covering this ground and I found this to be one of the most insightful. Just as the publishers reviews say this book focuses on the social, economic and especially psychological ways socialism and communism rose and fell as an ideological force. The way it does this in kind of mini-biographies makes the book very readable and I think very accurate. The story of the fall Communism does seem to fit this arc of the fall of its revolutionaries, then artist/writers, then the fall of its reformers (which is to say Communism itself was unreformable). I am surprised that this book is not more popular/well known.