LOUIS FISCHER: THE GOD THAT FAILED
Fischer begins by stating that what made him receptive to the Bolsheviks was that the end of World War I and the Versailles Treaty was as imperialist as the causes of the war in the first place. "I felt a compulsion to know the Europe that had so recently spawned a great war and a revolution" (Fischer 1949 112). In country after country, Fischer found despair. Especially in Germany which "was experiencing a perpetual nightmare of monarchistic-republican strife and inflation" (Fischer 1949 113) it seems obvious to Fischer that the victorious Allies were after revenge, unable to forget. For that reason, it seems, Russia and Germany were literally pushed into an entente. But, what particularly mad Fischer enthusiastic was the Communist pledge that "glorified the common man and offered him land, bread, peace, a job, a house, security, education, health, art, and happiness" (Fischer 1949 113). He claims that the unique appeal of Bolshevism was its universality. So, without knowing a word of Russian, he traveled to Moscow from Berlin. As he writes, he knew that he was not going to a Utopia, but he was curious to see if the system promised by the Bolsheviks could work.
None of what he saw "suggested Communism as a new way of life" (Fischer 114). The cities, he writes, were throbbing with new energy produced by new arrivals, willing to accept discipline in order to get a job, even at a low salary. As a somewhat nanve observer he wondered why other governments in the West would try to obstruct this "New Order" and new economic plan, or the international character of Communism, which sought to assimilate all the various ethnic groups in Russia. He seemed infected by what he saw, and when he returned to America, he found that people were either pro- or anti-Soviet. He felt he had to join the former group. "I preferred fresh sweeping winds to stagnant air, and well-intentioned pi...