What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it. You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.

Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

Writing should be testimony to the vast flow of life through us.

What is terrible when you seek the truth is that you find it.

It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?

I followed his argument with the blank uneasiness which one might feel in the presence of a logical lunatic.