The Anti-Communist Manifestos

Best-selling anticommunist memoirs, and occasionally novels, left an imprint on U.S. political life just before World War II. After the alliance with the Soviet Union fell apart, such exposés and confessions returned to even greater success. Liberal scholars of recent decades, troubled by the excesses of Cold War McCarthyism, are disposed to dismiss these volumes as sensationalized portraits of a communism too monolithic and conspiratorial. John V. Fleming, a retired professor of medieval literature at Princeton University, concurs that such books comprise a genre that shaped public opinion in postwar United States and France. He also sees redemptive qualities, sometimes artistic but above all in their role as “whistleblowers” about the resemblance of Soviet Communism to fascism. His aptly titled The Anti-Communist Manifestos revisits two celebrated prototypes, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) and Whitaker Chambers's Witness (1952), and a duo unjustifiably discarded, Jan Valtin's Out of the Night (1941) and Victor Kravchenko's I Choose Freedom (1946). On Koestler and Chambers, Fleming offers uncommon literary insights, especially into the latter's religiosity. The most inventive and gripping portion of Fleming's book, however, concerns the lesser-known works

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