ABSTRACT
The anticommunists combined ideological hatred for communism as an economic system with demonizing Bolshevik leaders. Members of the anti-Soviet camp were Machiavellian: they did not hesitate to employ spies, police, mercenary armies, diplomatic alliances, political leverage, and economic blockades to encircle and strangle the Russians. Western intellectuals substituted an "aristocracy of the mind" for an aristocracy of birth, which they had helped to destroy before and after the great French Revolution. The Soviet Union fortified the intellectual capacities and nourished the emotional needs of its citizens, allowing the individual to achieve "the free development of all his strengths and aptitudes". Romain Rolland showed that a majority of French intellectuals refused to align themselves with the organized working class out of their own sense of class superiority. Rolland provided his cast of fellow-traveling characters with a variety of opinions about the Soviet Union, thus outlining options for European progressives in the 1930s.
