The Institut avoided public criticism of the USSR until the Moscow purge trials

Evidence

Heated sub rosa discussions of Pollock’s findings did take place, but never broke into print. In fact, after his book was published in 1929, the Institut maintained an almost complete official silence about events in the USSR, broken only by an occasional survey of recent literature by Rudolf Schlesinger, who had been one of Grunberg’s students in the twenties. It was really not until a decade later, after the Moscow purge trials, that Horkheimer and the others, with the sole exception of the obdurate Grossmann, completely abandoned their hope for the Soviet Union. Even then, preoccupied with problems that will be discussed later, they never focused the attention of Critical Theory on the left-wing authoritarianism of Stalin’s Russia. The lack of available data certainly was one reason, but one ought not to ignore the difficulties involved in a Marxist analysis, however heterodox, of communism’s failures. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 136

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s Marxist self-understanding and their well-documented reticence on Soviet authoritarianism, relevant to any history of western Marxism vs. Soviet orthodoxy. — connects to: Leftist intellectuals defended the USSR as an ideal worth moral compromises — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 771; Adorno and Horkheimer suppressed Soviet criticism to preserve Moscow-aligned discipline in 1936.
• QUESTION: The passage gestures at ‘difficulties involved in a Marxist analysis, however heterodox, of communism’s failures’ — worth chasing why a heterodox Marxist critique of Soviet left-wing authoritarianism was so hard to articulate.

Broader Connections

• Leftist intellectuals defended the USSR as an ideal worth moral compromises #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 771