“History teaches us no longer to put our trust in those revelations, utopias and ideologies which promise universal bliss, proclaim the one and only possible path to this bliss and consequently make that path obligatory.

But despite the monstrous insanity, despite the suicidally pernicious forces which today rule my native land and a considerable portion of the earth, I hope that in the next century both my fellow countrymen and all the people in the world will live better, more reasonably, than we and our forefathers lived.”

“Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, this and a number of other such considerate actions were exceptions. The rule remained: unswerving devotion to the idol, the graven image I had helped to make.”

“Our century is more packed with such idols than any other since the time of Mahomet. Our forefathers revered prophets, tsars, generals, thinkers; Peter, Napoleon, Bismarck, Garibaldi, Rousseau, Nietz-sche. ...

But they saw them as heroes, lawgivers, savants, not as absolute geniuses equal to God, not as leaders of all mankind, not as the initiators of new "worldwide historical" epochs. Yet Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong became precisely such idols. Their high priests, servants and servantesses attributed supernatural virtues to them, served them bloody human sacrifices, tried to impose their cannibalistic creeds on all continents. To this end they composed mythical genealogies, founded posthumous cults of imaginary prede-cessors-caesars, emperors, heroes, Marx, Engels, Lenin.”

“In the war years and afterward in prison I reasoned less primitively and less cynically than in the time of my youthful radicalism. But I needed no less than two decades before I could begin to distinguish the concepts of sincerity and morality. The fanatical evildoer may be sincere, if his words and deeds match his convictions. But only he is moral who constantly checks his convictions with life, sees where the words and deeds determined by his convictions may lead (Dostoevsky).

And still later I began to realize that "the morality of a man is best expressed in his attitude toward words" (Lev Tolstoy). "The murder of the truthful word... was one of the blackest crimes committed by the decades" (Lydia Chukovskaya).”

“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.”

“In my memory the pain and horror of 1933 and 1937 had not grown cold. I remembered, knew and to a certain extent understood how he had schemed, how he had deceived us, how he had lied to us about the past and the present, when together with Hitler we had routed and divided up Poland, when we had waged a shameful war on Finland. And nevertheless I believed him all over again, as did comrades. I believed him more than at any time in the past.

Because, perhaps, at that moment I first felt a spontaneous, emotional attachment to him. Before there had been only respect, cold and calculated, at times timid: he was such an inscrutable, unpredictable, forbidding and cruel man. Respect was all I could manage for someone I considered a brilliant "boss," the best of all possible leaders of my country and all the good forces of the world.”

“The party drove out a man who had overstepped his authority, an "overbender," a perpetrator of the incipient famine. This gave credence to the other decisions and other reprisals taken against those declared guilty of all the misfortunes.

And so we continued to believe our rulers and our newspapers.

We believed, despite what we ourselves had seen, learned, experi-enced.”

“A centralized hierarchical state, it would seem, requires obedient and effective mechanisms of control. However, our party and state powers were imbued from the very outset with a fruitless rigmarole and bureaucratic runaround. At every crisis their power was magnified many times, as the irresponsible "higher-ups" shifted the responsibility for their inept orders onto the disconcerted "lower-downs," and then the diligent executives were punished for the oversights of their superiors.”

“The instincts of a power-hungry man lent an analytical sharpness to Stalin's limited, primitive, doctrinaire thought and suggested to him sufficiently effective ways to interpret and "reinterpret" reality.”

“He didn't say a word about the threat of famine. Instead, he repeated again and again that the class struggle was intensifying, and those who were "inclined to the counterrevolutionary theory of the weakening of the class struggle and the withering away of the class struggle ... [were] degenerates and double-dealers who should be driven out of the party." Virtually the only conclusion to be drawn from his report was an appeal for "revolutionary vigilance."’

“For what, against whom and how exactly we should struggle at any given moment was determined by the party, its leaders. Stalin was the most perspicacious, the most wise (at that time they hadn't yet started calling him "great" and "brilliant"). He said: "The struggle for grain is the struggle for socialism." And we believed him uncondi-tionally.”

“We were raised as the fanatical adepts of a new creed, the only true religion of scientific socialism. The party became our church mili-tant, bequeathing to all mankind eternal salvation, eternal peace and the bliss of an earthly paradise. It victoriously surmounted all other churches, schisms and heresies. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were accepted as holy writ, and Stalin was the infallible high priest.

Factories, mines, blast furnaces, locomotives, tractors, work-benches, turbines were transformed into objects of a cult, the sacramental objects blessed from on high. "Technology solves everything!" Men genuflected to these objects in poetry, prose, painting, film, mu-sic…”