On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers gave a fascinating account of all this in his bestselling 1952 memoir, Witness.
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Witness
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Indeed, Hiss denied the charges to his dying day; but, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, documents came to light establishing that, indeed, Hiss had been a Soviet agent.
A great many people were, to one degree or to another. Utterly failing to comprehend the essence of real economics, they had bought into technocratic visions, and saw the Soviet Union as the great hope for humankind.
When the truth of the brutality of the Soviet regime began to emerge, some swiftly dissociated themselves whereas others took decades to do so, and some just stayed in states of denial.
Amongst those who dissociated themselves were many who felt that persuading others that they’d never been agents or sympathizers was as good or almost as good as truly never having been such.