Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see with m… - Victor Kravchenko

I considered the Kremlin capable of any outrage. Its methods by this time seemed to me little better than those of the Nazis, especially in its treatment of its own people and in the forms of organization of power. Reading or listening to anti-Hitler propaganda, I could not help asking myself inwardly, ‘But how does this differ from our Soviet atrocities?’ All the same, I refused to credit the news of a Soviet pact that freed Hitler to make war on Poland and on the rest of Europe. There must be some mistake, I thought, and everyone around me seemed equally incredulous.

An American in uniform, accompanied by another in mufti, came to our car. He looked at our passports, checked them casually, without a trace of decent suspicion, and returned them to us with a smile. Informed that the civilian was a customs inspector, we had all putted out our suitcases and opened them wide. He glanced negligently at one or two, as a matter of form… We felt actually embarrassed by such absurd inefficiency and wondered where was the catch. Personal freedom is one thing, but didn't such lack of vigilance smack of anarchy, chaos? The two men lingered a few minutes, pleased to meet Russians. Then they wished us good luck and departed smiling. Somehow I had imagined that entering the United States would be a long elaborate process, requiring extensive inspections and perhaps interrogations behind closed doors.

The breakdown of world capitalism, the end of its ‘temporary stabilization,’ was the great consolation in Russia's travail. Our shrinking food supplies were being rigidly rationed. In the villages, famine held sway. Prisons, isolators and concentration camps were filling up with ‘enemies of the people.’ Thousands of our intelligentsia—engineers, officials, even well-known Communists—had to be liquidated as saboteurs and ‘agents of foreign governments.’ But the international working class was about to revolt! As Stalin put it, ‘The successes of the Five-Year Plan are mobilizing the revolutionary strength of the working class in all countries.’