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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn off Norway’s coast in 1974. His three-volume “Gulag Archipelago” was translated between 1973 and 1975. CreditKeystone/Getty Images

It was not a good idea that somehow went wrong or withered away. It was a very bad idea from the outset, and one forced into life — or the life of the undead — with barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism, and horror. The chief demerit of the Marxist program was its point-by-point defiance of human nature. Bolshevik leaders subliminally grasped the contradiction almost at once; and their rankly Procrustean answer was to leave the program untouched and change human nature. In practical terms this is what “totalitarianism” really means: On their citizens such regimes make “a total claim.”

The following is from “the secret archive,” published as “The Unknown Lenin” (1996), and the entry is dated March 1922: “It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) …” At this point the unversed reader might pause to wonder how the sentence will go forward. Something like “pursue all avenues of amelioration and relief,” perhaps?

But no. This is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of “a party of a new type,” who continues: “… carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy. … Precisely at this moment we must give battle to [the clergy] in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better.” Church records show that 1,962 monks, 2,691 priests and 3,447 nuns were killed in that year alone. Religion, you see, was part of human nature, so the Bolsheviks were obliged to suppress it in all its forms (including Islam and Buddhism).

“The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive” was edited by Richard Pipes, and Pipes was responsible for what is probably the most comprehensive account of the period, namely the trilogy “Russia Under the Old Regime,” “The Russian Revolution” and “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924.” The two best single-volume studies known to me share the virtues of erudition and brio; and they very nearly share a title — “The Soviet Tragedy,” by Martin Malia, and “A People’s Tragedy,” by Orlando Figes. It was indeed a “tragedy” in the colloquial sense (“an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress”), but not at all in the literary sense, with its implicit pattern of crisis/hubris/nemesis. What is eloquent, in this case, is the word’s derivation: from the Greek tragoidia, “apparently from tragos ‘goat’ + oide ‘song.’”

Song of the goat, the bleat as dirge — reminding us also that Russia was a rural society, and therefore the least eligible of the European powers for a “dictatorship of the proletariat”: There was a vast peasantry, but the proletariat was minuscule. The revolution came from above (a coup underscored by machine guns); the tragedy was experienced from below. “A People’s Tragedy,” then, is decidedly the more resonant.

Nowadays, of course, the “unknown” Lenin is unknown no longer — though as late as 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev was rereading the complete works of “Ilyich” (55 volumes in Russian) in search of some last-hour remedy, even as the U.S.S.R. was melting away all around him. Lenin bequeathed a fully functioning police state to Joseph Stalin ; thus the experiment, in its fulminant form, lasted from 1917 to 1953, by which time there were many millions of supernumerary deaths (and if Stalin hadn’t died in March of the latter year there would have been a second Jewish Holocaust by Christmastime). The verdict of history has at last been returned. But the jury — i.e., informed opinion in the First World — stayed out until the late 1970s. What took it so long?

Western intellectuals deserve their usual share of the obloquy. As one historian of Russia put it, it is to the intellectuals that we turn for “real prowess of wrong-headedness.” But it wasn’t just the pundits, the writers (H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw) and the philosophers (J.P. Sartre, A. J. Ayer) who swallowed the Moscow line; so did historians, sociologists, politicians, and even businessmen. To its supporters the allure of the Communist Party was twofold. The secondary appeal was that it gave you the (not quite delusive) impression that you were playing your part in world events; the primary appeal was that the program looked wonderful on paper, and spoke to the optimism and idealism of many of the most generous hearts and minds.

It was vaguely understood that there had been some loss of life: the terror and famine under Lenin, the Civil War, forced collectivization (“Ten millions,” Stalin said to Churchill, holding up both palms, in the Kremlin in 1942), the burgeoning system of state slavery known as the gulag (created under Lenin), the Great Purge of 1937-38.All that could be set aside, for now, because (a) revolutions are always violent, and (b) the ends supposedly justify the means.

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Nadezhda Mandelstam, author of “Hope Against Hope.”CreditFine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

As for the first point, the French revolutionary terror lasted from June 1793 to July 1794, and claimed more than 16,000 victims, no more than a busy couple of weeks for the Bolsheviks (and imagine if Robespierre had kept at it until 1830). As for the second point, well, there is a counterproposition: Means shape ends, and tend to poison them. We all know, now, what we think of the Good Intentions Paving Company. Anyway, the means were all the Soviet citizen was ever going to get. Western doublethink and selective blindness on this question is a very rich field; the wisest and most stylish guide to it is “Reflections on a Ravaged Century” (2000), by Robert Conquest, to whom we will necessarily return.

So far as I know, the first writer to see it all with an illusionless eye was that highly privileged observer Vladimir Nabokov (born 1899), whose family fled Russia in 1919. Once established in America, he was befriended by Edmund Wilson, and they engaged in a celebrated correspondence from 1940 to 1971 (published as “Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya”). Not lastingly duped by Stalin, the author of “To the Finland Station” was lastingly duped by Lenin and Trotsky. The Nabokov-Wilson letters are therefore very lively. Nabokov’s definitive rebuke is dated Feb. 23, 1948. It concludes:

“Under the Soviets, from the very start, the only protection a dissenter could hope for was dependent on governmental whims, not laws. No parties except the one in power could exist. Your Alymovs [Sergei Alymov was a showcase hack poet] are specters bobbing in the wake of a foreign tourist. Bureaucracy … took over immediately. Public opinion disintegrated. The intelligentsia ceased to exist. Any changes that took place between November [1917] and now have been changes in the décor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror.”

The correspondence ended in 1971, but the friendship died five years earlier. Nabokov could forgive Wilson’s mawkish indulgence of the Bolsheviks — but not his hostile and ignorant review of “Eugene Onegin” (Nabokov’s famously eccentric translation of Pushkin’s epic). Wilson died in 1972, just after his stern revision of “To the Finland Station”: “I have also been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin. … One can see the point of Lenin’s being short with the temporizing and arguing Russians but one cannot be surprised that he gave offense and did not show himself so benevolent as I perhaps tend to make him.” As for Trotsky (who said, inter alia, “We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life”), “I have not found anything,” Wilson wrote, “which obliges me to make any rectifications.” So this, among much else, went unrectified: “It is as a hero of the faith in Reason that Trotsky must figure for us.”

By 1972 Wilson might have found time to read the three outstanding memoirs of the period: “I Chose Freedom,” by Viktor Kravchenko (1946), “Journey Into the Whirlwind,” by Eugenia Ginzburg (1967), and “Hope Against Hope,” by Nadezhda Mandelstam (1970). Kravchenko was an apparat high-up who defected immediately after the war; Ginzburg was a provincial don and journalist who was found guilty of Trotskyism; and Mandelstam was the wife, and then the widow, of the great poet Osip (1891-1938). Cumulatively, these books persuade you of a disconcerting truth: Compared with Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany was a terrestrial paradise — except for Communists and Jews (and, later, Gypsies and homosexuals).

Kravchenko, Ginzburg and Mandelstam show us a society from which the concept of trust had been completely excised — a society where the conversational meaning of the question “Do they write?” was “Do they write letters of denunciation to the secret police?” You couldn’t trust your parents; you couldn’t trust your children. In addition, everyone was terrified all the time, right up to and including Stalin, who feared assassination at every waking minute. When he flew to Tehran for the first Big Three summit, his plane was escorted by 27 fighters; when he entrained for Potsdam (the third and final summit), his bodyguards numbered 18,500. By contrast, ordinary Germans knew no panic until 1943, as the reckoning loomed, and as the cities were being bombed nightly, then daily, then daily as well as nightly.

The truth about Russia dawned in cloud and mist. The first consciousness-shifting book was Conquest’s “The Great Terror” (1968). Very soon the samizdat version was circulating in Russia; and freshly enlightened parents would wonder if their growing teenagers were “ready for Conquest” and the attendant shock. Conquest had time to add “The Nation Killers” and “Lenin,” but not long enough to add ”Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps” (1976) — before the translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” was complete in its three volumes (1973-75). This was and is a visionary nonfiction epic written by an artist in the Russian Orthodox, old-regime tradition of Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Hereafter the great argument (like the original Marxist idea) had only a vampiric existence — technically dead, but still animate.

For a while anything that could be mistaken for “Red-baiting,” in the United Kingdom at least, was considered bad form, like kicking a man when he was down. About five years later there was a reaction, then an overreaction, then a judgment. Having gone from wondering whether Stalin was “better” than Churchill and Roosevelt, the commentariat was suddenly asking itself whether Stalin was better than Hitler; half a decade after that, the finding of “equivalence” at last gave way to “broad parity.” Equivalence marks the overreaction. Hitler and Stalin were not equivalent.

One of the few developments in recent years, apart from a further downgrading of Lenin and Trotsky, has been a morally slight but otherwise highly significant upgrading of Stalin. This was the result of two very substantial books by Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” (2003) and “Young Stalin” (2007). Montefiore is innocent of ideology; he is an honest Stakhanovite of the archives, and was genuinely embarrassed and apologetic about “changing the picture,” as his mentor, Conquest, “anti-Sovietchik number one” (according to the Kremlin), was the first to acknowledge.

What Montefiore has done is give flesh to the “Red Tsar.” For decades Trotsky’s jealous dismissal — “the gray blur,” the faceless bureaucrat — was the utterly misleading orthodoxy. Stalin was never a gray blur. Let us for a moment consider the Stalin versus Hitler question simply as a contest between two human beings. Until 1917 Stalin was a czarist dissident, a brawler, a boozer, a singer, a charmer, a womanizer and a brilliant mimic; he was not only a published but an anthologized poet; and he was wholly dedicated to the fight for universal equality and justice. Compare him with Hitler, the dank, sexless, humorless, milk-drinking vegetarian invert, nursing dreams, in his Viennese flophouse, of Judaeocide and world domination. Once established as the autocrat, Hitler went back to reading nothing but trash ethnology and the westerns of Karl May, whereas Stalin went back to reading Dickens, Chekhov, Gogol, Hemingway, Zola, Balzac, Maupassant and Oscar Wilde. Stalin was an Earthling; Hitler climbed up from the infernal regions.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” Wilde said, “is not worth even glancing at.” In fact the opposite is true. Utopia means “not place,” it means “nowhere.” In the 20th century the effort to create the Marxist variant cost close to 100 million lives (a mid-estimate not including warfare). Literary history, here, provides an unignorable hint. Every imagined Utopia, from Plato to the present day, helplessly becomes a Dystopia, almost certainly because the writers just couldn’t resist the urge to make the “place” sound halfway interesting. Otherwise the Perfect Society is perfectly inhuman and perfectly inane. What would you do all day in Utopia? And who now would turn to a map of the world in a vain quest for the wastelands called Never Has Been, Never Could Be and Never Should Be?