How Vladimir Putin will respond to these setbacks is anyone’s guess. But Leon Aron contends that something can be learned about his regime by looking at a largely forgotten short Russian novel, which testifies to “mankind’s ineradicable yearning for the dignity in gaining moral autonomy from the totalitarian state.”

Titled The Thaw, the book appeared just a year and a half after Stalin’s death in 1953. On the surface, the narrative tells of the goings-on in a small Soviet town and the large industrial plant that sustains it. But readers at that time took it for what it was: a lightly penciled yet unmistakable outline of a thin but durable shoot of civil society breaking through the Stalinist permafrost.

Its author, Ilya Ehrenburg, co-edited, along with his fellow Soviet Jewish novelist Vasiliy Grossman, The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, one of the first systematic accounts of the Holocaust. The authorities deemed the book anti-Soviet, and it wasn’t published in Russian until 1980, and then only in Jerusalem. But for the most part, Ehrenburg adhered to the party line and, Aron writes, was “uncannily” good at anticipating its abrupt changes. Aron goes so far as to call Ehrenburg “Stalin’s favorite Jew.”

The admiration, however, was not necessarily mutual, as The Thaw makes as clear as any book published inside a totalitarian regime can:

Recovering from the memory hole the shameful and scary events that the party wished to bury, Ehrenburg writes about Anna Sherer, a Jewish doctor at the plant’s clinic. Having lost a husband in the war and her mother and sister to the Holocaust, Anna is brought to tears by Pravda’s “announcement” about an “uncovered group of doctors-wreckers, almost all Jews,” who had been alleged to poison the country’s leaders—the nightmarish Doctors’ Plot that was intended as a prologue to a nationwide pogrom and was cancelled only by Stalin’s death. “Sometimes people say such dreadful things,” she confides to a friend. “Don’t trust the doctors!” workers had groused loudly in the clinic’s reception. “Especially the likes of her!”

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”