There were some diehard Western communists who never did get the news that Josef Stalin was a murdering tyrant and his Soviet Union was not the progressive mecca of their dreams, but a sinkhole of repression, tyranny and racism. They dreamed on, long after the Hitler-Stalin pact and the show trials and all the other signals that their god had failed. Like true believers in all times and places, they made the fatal error of believing that the ends justified the means. Their error was that Stalin was not even in agreement with them about what the ends were.