[In the following review of Winter in Moscow, Buckley praises Muggeridge's command of detail and his ability to write convincing vignettes.]

Before there was Solzhenitsyn, or Pasternak, or Djilas, or Orwell, or Koestler, there was Muggeridge. He covered, or uncovered, the Soviet Union for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33, laying bare its stupendous horrors even as Walter Duranty and Claud Cockburn were dutifully retailing their obsequious lies about Stalin for American and English readers. He told the West about the Ukrainian famine, a feature of Stalin's farm-collectivization program whose magnitude—on the order of 14 million deaths—is only now penetrating the consciousness.

The truth about Stalin was only part of the story Muggeridge had to tell, the other part being the lies of the tyrant's Western sycophants. In Winter in Moscow—first published in 1934 and now reissued by Eerdmans in a handsome paperback edition, with an eloquent introduction by Michael Aeschliman—Muggeridge uses the medium of a satirical novel to tell the world about the role of his contemptible journalistic colleagues, without whom the Gulag would not have been possible.

Solzhenitsyn gives us the scope and scale of Stalinism. Muggeridge's beat is the detail, the vignette, the miniature scene that mustn't be allowed to fall beneath our notice, such things providing revelations of how the whole evil was realized at the level of ordinary life. He introduces us, for example, to Jefferson, the Duranty-like American journalist who always knows which way the wind is blowing: “He kept up-to-date in his allegiances.” When word of the famine threatens to leak out, Jefferson is forced to draw on all his resources:

He'd been asked to write something about the food shortage, and was trying to put together a thousand words which, if the famine got worse and known outside Russia, would suggest that he'd foreseen and foretold it, but which, if it got better and wasn't known outside Russia, would suggest that all along he'd poohpoohed the possibility of there being a famine.

Muggeridge's Western journalists fraternize with what Djilas would later teach us to call the New Class, the privileged, profiteering, parasitical ruling apparatus of Bolshevism, whose members spout absurd statistics of industrial and agricultural production as ordinary Russians starve in the streets. Fools and cynics, these Westerners feast at Stalin's table, and are so eager to oblige him that his censorship is almost otiose.

Their words are the only link between the Soviet reality and their readers, and Muggeridge, the astringent stylist, is fascinated by a language that has entirely lost its moorings. Stalinist oratory is no more mendacious than the dispatches of the Jeffersons.

What Muggeridge shows us is an enclave of luxurious corruption, lust, envy, and spite within an empire of ghastly misery. The progressive-minded correspondents are eager to get in on the free love they've heard about. One new arrival asks breathlessly where she can find the local abortion center (“Do you do foreigners?”).

We also meet the less privileged. A peasant woman briskly kills her three starving children with an axe, then lures a Communist officer into her house, where it's his turn. Pravda takes the incident as the occasion for an alarmist editorial titled “We must increase class vigilance on the agricultural front.”

Mordant satire, to be sure, written out of an abyss of desolate cynicism, but Muggeridge renders it all with a vividness that is constantly believable. And we know, as readers in 1934 can't have known, that if these things didn't happen, far worse things did. Jonathan Swift never showed human beings behaving as contemptibly as Muggeridge's characters do (the few exceptions, toward the end of the book, come as a relief, though they can't prevail in such a world).

What drives it all is a colossally frustrated pity, an outrage that people can stand by and permit their fellow men to be reduced to a level of suffering where absolutely no dignity can exist. Muggeridge can express this in a swift gesture: a hungry man snatches an orange peel from a spittoon and eats it. The man with the orange hardly notices; he goes on chattering with his companion.

As always, Muggeridge writes brilliantly. Every sentence is a sure stroke of color or wit, even when the message seems relentlessly bleak. In the middle of the book he pauses for a direct cri de cœur: an argument that even Bolshevism must at last exhaust itself, because such malignity can't be sustained forever. It is as if this faith was all he had to keep him going after what he had seen. An angrier book has never been written, nor one whose fury was so richly justified by its contents.