the light from the sky was rich and pellucid as nowhere else

[...] 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.