I earned my doctorate four years after I arrived in the United States. In 1968 I was a freshly-minted assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. The Tet offensive was on and Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency. The Vietnam War protests were at their peak. I could not understand it: weren’t we fighting the most evil political force on earth? Communism maimed the lives of my peers and destroyed many heroes of Polish resistance, such as General Emil Fieldorf. Fieldorf fought the Nazis during the war but fell into the communists’ hands afterward and was sentenced to death, together with tens of thousands (this is not an exaggeration) of other Polish patriots. Communism thwarted the intellectual development of two generations in Central Europe by limiting access to what could be read and discussed. It subjected my fellow citizens in Poland to communism-induced poverty that required bartering skills and a certain kind of alertness unknown in capitalism to procure household goods. It required them to live on monthly allowances of $10 or $15. It further injured them by making it virtually impossible to advance in many professions without joining the communist party.

American students did not know about this, and my liberal professors (now colleagues) did not want to know. They psyched themselves into believing that communism represented a new era in the development of humanity, and interference with it was highly inappropriate. They taught their students accordingly. I could not convey that absent knowledge to them because I was hired to teach literature and literary criticism rather than politics. One day a student rally protesting the Vietnam War blocked entrances to all office buildings at Indiana University. I remember the protesters chanting that Nixon was worse than Hitler. This was the last straw. To me, Nixon was a hero for trying to stop communism in Vietnam. Americans had no economic or political interests in that country—I considered American intervention to be a truly noble action, one of the few disinterested actions by a great power that would survive in historical memory as proof that not all politics is generated by greed, hatred, or self-interest. I was so upset over the students’ refusal to let me into Ballantine Hall, home to Indiana University’s literature and language departments, that I decided to get to my office no matter what. With the help of my husband, an assistant professor of mathematics, I climbed in through a window onto the second floor. Once inside, it was a breeze to get to my office. I won against the pro-communist rally.

The brainwashing performed by Soviet sympathizers on American campuses was universal in those days, and only persons on the Right dared to say that the pro-Soviet indulgence was based on wishful thinking rather than fact. The liberals were like sleepwalkers in a fog. How did it happen that in a free country like the United States the entire academic community had fallen under the spell of the discreet charm of the Gulagoisie? Mild criticism of the Soviet Union was pervasive, but my fellow professors of Russian history and literature treated Soviet culture and politics as if it were genuine, and not a cover for one of the worst periods of barbarism in history. How was it possible that they did not wish to understand that communist practice was grounded in a deep contempt for humankind? Even in a free country it is apparently possible to fool most of the people most of the time.

The indifference toward the criminality of the Soviet enterprise made me take a second look at other idées reçues of liberal thinkers. I noted that they generally praised the French Revolution, just as it had been in the school textbooks I endured in Soviet-occupied Poland. I noted that in the American academic establishment, just as in Soviet-occupied Poland, the Spanish Civil War was described in black and white terms, Franco being all black and the republicans all white. I noted that the rise of communism in Hungary and Germany after the First World War was gently smoothed away in books, as if the German or Hungarian communists were the good guys opposing the all-bad “fascist” establishments. I noted that the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, in which the newly reconstituted Poland miraculously defeated the Soviet Union (somewhat like Finland in 1940), thus stopping the march of communism westward, was erased from America’s historical memory. I noted that the lighthearted commentary on the Soviet Union supplied by American Sovietologists (Richard Pipes being a rare exception) falsified the relationship between Soviet Russia and the subjugated nations of Central and Eastern Europe. I noted that no one on the Left really cared that, were it not for Stalin’s friendship with Hitler expressed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, there would have been no Second World War. In those days no respectable publisher would accept U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane’s book I Saw Poland Betrayed. I also noted that in order to advance in American academia, one had to accept a great deal of the idées reçues that I knew were wrong, and profess disinterest in any kind of historical inquiry that did not correspond to an agenda friendly to the Left. In these circumstances, the additional factor of “the amazing power of money” (to borrow from Great Expectations) made brilliant writers side with the Left and keep inventing reasons to do so. With skills and talents worthy of a better cause, liberal writers and professors drummed into their students’ heads a version of twentieth-century European history that I knew was inaccurate.

The only people who proclaimed that the evil empire was indeed evil were on the conservative Right. I had no choice but to join them. As years went by and my philosophical horizons broadened, I also realized that the most persuasive arguments about the meaning of language and reality also came from the Right. Thus I became a conservative.