I know, moreover, that millions who escaped the purge were maimed in their minds and wounded in their spirits by the fears and the brutalities amidst… - Victor Kravchenko

The Soviet hierarchy does not need impressive arguments to line up Party opinion. An instinct for survival does the trick. To avoid trouble one not merely believes, but believes deeply, fervently, whatever absurdity is prescribed from on high. The great Stalin knows what he’s doing—ultimately that was the sum-total of the Party reaction.

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.’

The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon–like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.