In October 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, Stalin's secret police was shooting roughly 1,500 Soviet citizens…

In October 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, Stalin's secret police was shooting roughly 1,500 Soviet citizens every day. That same month, the founders of the London School of Economics published the second edition of their two-volume defense of Stalin's regime, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. The one thing they changed from the first edition was dropping the question mark. 🧵

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were not fringe figures. They co-founded the London School of Economics in 1895. They built the Fabian Society into the intellectual engine of the British left. They drafted much of what became the modern British welfare state. Sidney had served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour cabinet. Beatrice was one of the most influential sociologists in Europe.

In May 1932, both in their seventies, they landed in Leningrad for a two-month tour of the Soviet Union. Their hosts arranged the itinerary: model schools, model clinics, model factories, model collective farms. Beatrice fell ill and rested in the Caucasus. Sidney was walked through Ukraine. He was walked through Ukraine in the summer before Stalin's grain seizures produced a state-engineered famine that killed several million Ukrainians. He noticed nothing.

Three years later, in December 1935, they published Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? Two volumes. 1,174 pages. A methodical, statistics-heavy endorsement of Stalin's regime, built almost entirely from documents the Soviet embassy in London had supplied to them.

They were not fooled. Beatrice's own diary contains this line: "There is one dark spot: the lack of free expression among those intellectuals who are against the Communist creed and the practice thereof." She published the book anyway.

Between the first edition and the second, Stalin held two Moscow show trials. Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had helped lead the 1917 revolution alongside Lenin, were tried in August 1936. Both were shot within 24 hours of their verdict. Yuri Pyatakov was tried in January 1937 and shot two days after his sentence. By October 1937, most of the founding revolutionaries who had made the Soviet Union existed in one of two states: already dead, or waiting.

The man running the machine was Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Historians now estimate that Stalin's Great Terror produced around 800,000 executions across the 16 months between August 1937 and November 1938. That averages to roughly 1,700 people shot per day, every day, for close to 500 days. October 1937 sat inside that peak, and the pace was still climbing. Order 00447, Yezhov's mass operation against so-called "kulaks" and "anti-Soviet elements," was running at full quota. Regional NKVD offices were petitioning Moscow for the right to shoot more people than their quotas allowed.

The Webbs' response to all of this was a second edition of the same book without the question mark. Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? became Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. The second edition, released in the month Yezhov's execution quotas were still climbing, was answering the question from the first edition.

The prominent British historian A.J.P. Taylor, in his 1965 history of Britain from 1914 to 1945, devoted one sentence to the Webbs' book. He called it "the most preposterous book ever written about Soviet Russia."

Beatrice died in April 1943. Sidney died in October 1947. That December, at George Bernard Shaw's suggestion, their ashes were reinterred together in the nave of Westminster Abbey. They remain the only married couple ever buried there. Prime Minister Clement Attlee delivered the address. He said millions were living "fuller and freer lives" today because of the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He did not mention the other millions.