The God That Failed

The collection, conceived and edited by Labour member of parliament Richard Crossman, gathers six essays by writers who embraced communism and later rejected it: Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Stephen Spender and the American foreign correspondent Louis Fischer. Each tells how a search for a better humanity led him to communism, and of the agony and revulsion that drove him away. Fischer's essay defines a Kronstadt as the moment a communist or fellow traveler decides not only to leave the party but to oppose it, a term later used by Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr. Crossman also asked Chambers to contribute, but Chambers, still at Time and not yet public about Alger Hiss, declined.

Marc Andreessen included it in the books he listed in his Andreessen Horowitz post What I've Been Up To Lately.