As far as we know, Vladimir Lenin never used the phrase “useful idiots.” But he certainly recognized the concept. Throughout the Soviet Union’s baleful seven-decade existence, there were plenty of Western leftists prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Most infamous is New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who determinedly shut his eyes to the evidence of Josef Stalin’s reign of terror: the arrests, the show trials, the collectivization of agriculture. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote in 1933, when the deliberate starvation of the kulaks had claimed at least 7 million lives.