Leon's story encapsulates the fate of the debate over the Jewish Question within the Jewish left: it was murdered midsentence. Traverso writes that “the war and the Holocaust … by exterminating most of [the debate's] actors, destroyed the conditions for such a debate.” It was more than that, too. For many of those who survived, Stalin went on to kill their confidence in the possibility—even the desirability—of revolutionary change. Unlike the beacon of Red Vienna, the more brutal and totalitarian the Soviet experiment became, the less socialism seemed able to offer a moral alternative to barbarism. Stalin's greatest betrayal of all.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 961