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.