The Captive Mind - Wikipedia

Born on June 30, 1911, Czeslaw Milosz, Polish-American writer (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1980). One of the great transplant writers to the United States, Miłosz poetry is widely well-respected. He died August 14, 2004. He had been a member of the Polish Communist Party and was a cultural attache' in Paris. He defected in 1951.
One of his most famous books is the Captive Mind. A warning to the West about communism/Stalinism. It is well worth reading. The article gives a good summation of the book. From the article:
"The Captive Mind was an immediate success which was to bring its author international renown.[12] While banned in Poland, it circulated underground there, Miłosz being among those authors whose name could not be mentioned even in order to denounce. The book is described by historian Norman Davies as a "devastating study" which "totally discredited the cultural and psychological machinery of Communism".[13] In that the book represents the view of an insider and draws on extensive analysis, it has been compared to Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.[12]

Miłosz has said of the book 'It was considered by anti-communists as suspect because I didn't attack strongly enough the communists. I tried to understand the processes and they didn't like that. And it also created the idea, particularly in the West, that I was a political writer. This was a misunderstanding because my poetry was unknown. I have never been a political writer and I worked hard to destroy this image of myself.'"