When Aldous Huxley tackled the topic of communism in a review of René Fülöp-Miller's The Mind and Face of Bolshevism for Vanity Fair, in a piece titled ‘The Cold-Blooded Romantics’, he scathingly remarked that

He went on:

A similar love of the machine has shaped the new art and literature of the West, where ‘Cubism’ is ‘deeply symptomatic of the revolt against the soul and the individual’, and artists and writers have followed the Bolshevik attack on ‘sentimentality’ and declared that art ‘is a question of pure form’.

Huxley's attention to Fülöp-Miller tends to confirm the influence of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism after 1927 in turning attention away from the fact of revolution as such on to the nature of the new society, and in particular on its convergence with developments in American capitalism. The focus on the revolution itself is reflected in much of the writing we have examined in this study. The conduct and immediate outcomes of the Russian Revolution had placed the act of revolution itself dramatically in the foreground, while the implications of the Bolshevik attempt to remodel the human – albeit by way of such seemingly banal interventions in the everyday as Trotsky's denunciation of swearing – was not commonly set in the context of the wider question of the human future, in the context not only of capitalism and class society, but also in terms of any working out of the implications of intensifying industrialisation and communications which had already, as Trotsky had noted, turned the entire world into a workshop.