Winter was a torture (there is no other word for it) for the townspeople: no heating, no lighting, and the ravages of famine. Children and feeble old folk died in their thousands. Typhus was carried everywhere by lice, and took its frightful toll. All this I saw and lived through, for a great while indeed. Inside Petrograd’s grand apartments, now abandoned, people were crowded in one room, living on top of one another around a little stove of brick or cast iron which would be standing on the floor, its flue belching smoke through an opening in the window. Fuel for it would come from the floorboards of rooms nearby, from the last stick of furniture available, or else from books. Entire libraries disappeared in this way. I myself burned the collected Laws of the Empire as fuel for a neighboring family, a task that gave me considerable satisfaction. [...]

[...] Bolshevik thought draws its inspiration from the feeling of possession of the truth. In the eyes of Lenin, of Bukharin, of Preobrazhensky, dialectical materialism is both the law of human thought as well as that of the development of nature and of societies. Bolshevik thinking is grounded in the possession of the truth. The Party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking that differs from it is a dangerous or reactionary error. Here lies the spiritual source of its intolerance. The absolute conviction of its lofty mission assures it of a moral energy quite astonishing in its intensity— and, at the same time, a clerical mentality which is quick to become Inquisitorial. Lenin’s “proletarian Jacobinism,” with its detachment and discipline both in thought and action, is eventually grafted upon the preexisting temperament of activists molded by the old regime, that is by the struggle against despotism. I am quite convinced that a sort of natural selection of authoritarian temperaments is the result. Finally, the victory of the revolution deals with the inferiority complex of the perpetually vanquished and bullied masses by arousing in them a spirit of social revenge, which in turn tends to generate new despotic institutions. I was witness to the great intoxication with which yesterday’s sailors and workers exercised command and enjoyed the satisfaction of demonstrating that they were now in power!

[...] In Petrograd I could see what was happening to the book trade: the stocks of the bookshops, which had been confiscated, were rotting away in cellars that as often as not were flooded with water in the spring. We were most thankful to the thieves who salvaged a goodly number of books and put them back, clandestinely, into circulation. The book trade could, if it had been turned over to associations of book lovers, have speedily recovered its health. In a word, I was arguing for a “Communism of associations”— in contrast to the Communism of the State variety. The competition inherent in such a system and the disorder inevitable in all beginnings would have caused less inconvenience than did our stringently bureaucratic centralization, with its muddle and paralysis. I thought of the total plan not as something to be dictated by the State from on high, but rather as resulting from the harmonizing, by congresses and specialized assemblies, of initiatives from below. However, since the Bolshevik mind had already ordained other solutions, it was a vision confined to the realms of pure theory.

I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great revolutions, which do not happen according to the taste of well-intentioned men, but spontaneously, with the violence of tempests; that the individual has as much weight as straw in a hurricane; and that the duty of revolutionaries is to employ the only weapons that history affords us if we are not to be overwhelmed through our own folly. But the perpetuation of terror, after the end of the Civil War and the transition to a period of economic freedom, was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception. I still ask myself, having closely observed the probity and intelligence of its leaders, why it didn’t. What psychoses of fear and of power prevented it?

[...] Twenty-five years old, he is a young rogue who argues like a cynic. He has an infant prodigy’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, a sense of history, merciless views on his elders, and a love for a theoretical working class beside which the actual working class is only highly imperfect human material.

[...] I saw a woman hit in the face and thrown down the steps with her clothes half torn off. The manager came over to talk to me and told me quite coolly, “ What are you so shocked about? She’s nothing but a whore! Just put yourself in my shoes!” He is a Communist, this manager: we belong to the same Party.

Poets and novelists are not political beings because they are not essentially rational. Political intelligence, based though it is in the revolutionary’s case upon a deep idealism, demands a scientific and pragmatic armor, and subordinates itself to the pursuit of strictly defined social ends. The artist, on the contrary, is always delving for his raw material in the subconscious, in the preconscious, in intuition, in a lyrical inner life that is rather hard to define; he does not know with any certainty either where he is going or what he is creating. If the novelist’s characters are truly alive, they function by themselves, to a point at which they eventually take their author by surprise, and sometimes he is quite perplexed if he is called upon to classify them in terms of morality or social utility. Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Balzac brought to life, all lovingly, criminals whom the Political Man would shoot most unlovingly. That the writer should involve himself in social struggles, have enriching convictions, that his potency will increase to the extent that he identifies himself with the rising classes, thus communicating with masses of individuals who carry within them a precious potential all this does not significantly alter the simple psychological truths that I set out above. [...]

[...] I shall never forget the way in which some of the sick people gazed at me when I was brought such food, or their deference when they took their share of it. Nor, for that matter, shall I forget how on the most wretched of our days of misery we all heard a radio broadcast from a regional meeting of kolkhoz workers. Passionate voices went on endlessly thanking the Leader for “the good life we lead,” and twenty or so patients tormented by hunger, half of them kolkhoz workers themselves, listened to it all in silence.

My heart was utterly ravaged as I left; I was severing attachments of a unique quality. I should have liked to have those dear faces, that I would never see again, imprinted on my brain, and those landscapes of white countryside, and even the image of our vast Russian misery, lived out by this brave, gritty, patient people. If I could have believed in any reasonable chance that I should not ultimately have been obliterated in a voiceless struggle that was already sterile, I would have been content to remain there even if it were in some little Mongol fishing village inside the Arctic Circle. But we do not live for ourselves; we live to work and fight.

The press is still making reassuring remarks—“The Weygand Line will hold fast!”—meanwhile “German infiltration” has got as far as the Somme, reaching Forges-les-Eaux ... In the June sunlight, the Champs-Elysees still keeps its smiling face. I am resolved to put off leaving until almost the last train, for I still feel some vague hope that the situation will mend, and I have practically no money. When Paris ends the world ends; useless to see the truth, how could one bear to acknowledge it? On Sunday the 9th, I see Cabinet ministers moving house. Cars, blanketed with mattresses and overloaded with trunks, hurry off towards the city’s southern gates. Shops close. The Paris of these last evenings is splendid. The great empty boulevards enter into the night with an extraordinary nobility. The darkened squares exude an air of calm and dormant power. People, too, are calm, showing greater fortitude in disaster than they seemed to before. The idea arises that they did not deserve this defeat. History had turned against them and the government of this people was so different from the people! What could the man in the street do if the French metal industry was crumbling away for lack of investment? What power did he have over capital?