“This belief and even heartfelt devotion could not easily be broken.

It was not broken even by many years of prisons and camps, the many new nightmares of postwar imperialism, the reprisals against entire peoples, against former prisoners of war, against "henchmen of the Tito clique," against "cosmopolites," against "recidivists."

Several years were required after the first disclosures of "the cult of personality," years during which I determinedly reflected on my own recollections, wrenching from myself "drop by drop" the world view and world conception, the ideology and psychology of a slavish doctrinaire myth-making, before I could finally begin to understand what an ugly little pygmy I had imagined to be a handsome giant, how irremediably disastrous our—my—dialectical illusions and blind faith had been.”