In her memoir of Russian intellectual life under Stalin, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls that her husband Osip had “an occasional desire . . . to come to terms with reality and make excuses for it. . . . At such moments, he would say that . . . he feared the Revolution might pass him by if, in his short-sightedness, he failed to notice all the great things happening before our eyes.” She immediately explains that this mood can't just reflect one person's psychiatric stress since it was so widely shared. “It must be said that the same feeling was experienced by many of our contemporaries, including the most worthy of them, such as Pasternak.” Her most-quoted sentence follows:
My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word “Revolution,” which none of them could bear to give up. It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital punishment.
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