ABSTRACT
An influential section of the Western intelligentsia became addicted, to a greater or lesser degree, to Marxism and even to Marxism-Leninism, though more often these days to a variety of sub-Marxist anti-democratic pseudologies. Mainly as part of this phenomenon, many academics became firm believers in a large array of falsehoods about the Marxist states, in particular the Soviet Union. Not all Marxists, indeed, believed the Soviet myth, though most of them did. Over the 1940s and 1950s much truth about the USSR became available in the West, and there were a number of academics who were, in one way or another, directly and personally involved in the real politics of the war and of the post-war world, including the aspects involving the Soviet Union. An academic scandal well known in the Sovietological field ensued. In pre-democratic days, some of them were praised by reactionary Soviet writers as "objective"–a traditional Soviet expression meaning reasonably uncritical of the old official line.
