Useful Idiots

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/07/100624_doc_useful_idiots_lenin.shtml
"But by the 1930s, when the U.S. and other industrialized nations were enduring the Great Depression-a crisis that many believed marked the 'death throes' of capitalism-sympathy for Communism and Soviet Russia expanded markedly. Leftist writers like Beatrice and Sydney Webb and New York times writer Walter Duranty offered rosy assessments of Communism under Lenin and Stalin. (Years later, it was revealed that Duranty was actually being blackmailed by the Soviets throughout his stint in Moscow.) Journalists and Lenin admirer Lincoln Steffens famously pronounced in 1921, 'I have seen the future and it works'" Mona Charen, "Useful Idiots," p.15