So you’re saying you had a chance to become an expert on Stalinism without having to slog through the boring volumes of Solzhenitsyn? I know of the technique and it is as I said an exercise in practical ignorance, if it is “fun”. Education for the likes of Rachel Jeantel, by the likes of Rachel Jeantel.
At the time, Solzhenitsyn was best known as a writer of fiction--his Gulag Archipelago was about a year away from publication--and, by the way, it's anything but boring.
Instead, to prepare for the big socialist conference, I slogged though tomes such as Boris Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (New York: Alliance, 1939), William Henry Chamberlin's The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (New York: Macmillan, 1935) and Worker's Paradise Lost: Fifty Years of Soviet Communism: A Balance Sheet by Eugene Lyons (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967).
And I had to not only make a case for Stalinism but also to argue the case against Trotskyism, social democracy, anarchism and Fabian socialism, so I had to do my share of reading.