The theatres of the capital [Moscow] were developing a great interest in German drama. In fact, everything Germanic was the vogue. A brutal John Bull… - Victor Kravchenko

Genghis Khan was an amateur, a muddier, compared to Stalin. The Kremlin clique had carried through a ruthless war on their own country and people. It was the wind-up of this long war that was signalized by the appearance of a new history. It proved to be a document probably without precedent. Shamelessly, without so much as an explanation, it revised half a century of Russian history. I don't mean simply that it falsified some facts or gave a new interpretation of events. I mean that it deliberately stood history on its head, expunging events and inventing facts. It twisted the recent past—a past still fresh in millions of memories—into new and bizarre shapes, to conform with the version of affairs presented by the blood-purge trials and the accompanying propaganda.

Having discovered that I could write and speak on my feet with some natural eloquence, I was soon an ‘activist.’ I served on all kinds of committees, did missionary work among the non-Party infidels, played a role in the frequent celebrations. There were endless occasions to celebrate, over and above the regular revolutionary holidays. The installation of new machinery, the opening of new pits, the completion of production schedules were marked by demonstrations, music, speeches. Elsewhere in the world coal may be just coal—with us it was ‘fuel for the locomotives of revolution.’

[H]atred of Nazism had been drummed into our minds year after year. We had seen our leading Army Generals, including Tukhachevsky, shot for supposed plotting with Hitler’s Reichswehr. The bit treason trials, in which Lenin’s most intimate associates perished, had rested on the premise that Nazi Germany and its Axis friends, Italy and Japan, were preparing to attack us. Those nations, indeed, were only the spearheads of a world coalition of capitalists sworn to destroy our socialist fatherland. The brutalities of the super-purge had been justified largely on the basis of that imminent Nazi-led assault against us.