The idol enthroned in Russia after 1917 was abstract, and for that reason all the more merciless — class and "historical necessity." The living human being, with his name, his fate, and his conscience, was declared a derivative of class origin, a part of a vast mechanism, a "cog." If history moves by iron laws toward an inevitable happiness, then a single life is only a means, and it can be disregarded. In this arithmetic the essential thing vanished: the unrepeatability of the face. The human being ceased to be a person and became a function.
Out of this substitution grew a catastrophe stretched over decades. The Civil War, the famine of 1921–22, then the monstrous famine of 1932–33 brought on by forced collectivization and dekulakization — millions dead. The Great Terror of 1937–38: in two years more than a million and a half people were arrested, about 680,000 shot. The system of the Gulag spread — an archipelago of camps that ground people down with labor and hunger. A separate wound was the destruction of the Church: over the years of persecution tens of thousands of Orthodox priests were arrested and many thousands shot; churches were blown up or turned into warehouses.
The captivity was not only behind barbed wire. All of society sank into an atmosphere of fear and silence, where the informer's denunciation became a way of life and the lie a condition of survival. People learned not to think aloud, to hide their faces, to say one thing and know another. This is the deepest bondage — when unfreedom settles within, in language itself, and truth is too dangerous to entrust even to those closest.
But here too the law made itself known — in a quiet, muted return. The new martyrs appeared: people who under the threat of death did not renounce, and their very silent standing became testimony that a human being cannot be dissolved without remainder into a class. Camp literature was born — the confession of those who passed through hell and kept the word; the testimony carried out from behind the wire proved stronger than the machine of the lie. The clear-sightedness ripened slowly: what is living in a human being — conscience, memory, dignity — yields fully neither to classification nor to destruction.