 Hook went against the grain of the growing radical movements in the United States which had become more pro-Soviet as the economic depression lengthened and the New Deal was perceived on the left as having failed to solve the problems of the depression. Hook became a severe critic of the movement of policy in the Soviet Union, including the formulation of the charge that the Soviet rehabilitation camps were actually a form of slave labor, that the purges of writers and artists represented brutal repression, and that the trials of leading members of the Communist Party and the Politburo were show trials which involved framing the accused in order to strengthen Stalin’s position in his struggle for complete power. Hook’s criticism of communism in the Soviet Union went through several phases and the earliest phase was not anti-socialist, perhaps not even anti-communist, but could be identified as anti-Stalinist. It also represented a degree of identification with the thought and political approach of what was termed during that time Trotskyism.