CAN YOU FORGIVE HIM?

If a tale of political migration is to have any real punch, it needs a touch of passionate intensity—and, as Yeats pointed out, that's what the worst are full of. The journey from moderate liberalism to moderate conservatism or vice versa is the stuff of watery op-ed pieces and policy monographs, but it doesn't provide much in the way of narrative drive. A cracking good story requires something stronger at one end or the other, or both. Stalinism supplied that something stronger a half century ago. Its apostates moved by definition from left to right, though many of them stopped well short of the opposite pole of the spectrum. Of the six contributors to "The God That Failed," for example, five (Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, André Gide, and Louis Fischer) ended up on the moderate left, and one (Arthur Koestler) turned away from politics. For these writers, the break was with political extremism itself as much as with its Stalinist manifestation. Other ex-Communists—one thinks of Whittaker Chambers and a multitude of lesser lights—took refuge in belief systems almost as Manichaean and doctrinaire as the one they abandoned.