That some members of the young generation expressed their approval of the new regime and accepted its activities without suspicion was certainly due to the fact that they had grown up under Nazi occupation and had been denied education. These efforts produced a paradoxical result. Nazi propaganda was seen as deceitful and antagonistic, which was how all attacks against Bolshevism came to be perceived. (When the Nazis announced their discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers who had been murdered in the Katyn Forest by Stalin’s secret police, few doubted that this was a Nazi lie.)
Who of the youth knew the details of the Soviet dictator’s path to power? Who at ten or fifteen years of age was interested in trials in which the Soviet dictator liquidated his opponents group by group? Who knew that millions of innocent victims of the Communist regime were leading miserable existences or dying in Siberian concentration camps?
But because the trials of enemies of the people, reactionaries, conspirators, spies, and traitors became one of the fundamental and essential pillars of Communist dictatorship, it was necessary to acquaint those who suspected nothing, who were uninterested, with these methods.
And so, soon after the coup, carefully manipulated information concerning these events began to appear. Alongside the quickly translated and published transcripts of the staged trials (which were sometimes difficult to accept if only for their absurdity) or the boring and, for the uninitiated, incomprehensible History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, further works of Stalinist propaganda were published that were masterful in their mendacity. Among them was The Great Conspiracy, which pretended to be nonfiction: To provide it with the appearance of greater objectivity it was written (or at least signed) by two American Communists, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. This pamphlet about a worldwide imperialist conspiracy against the land of the Soviets skillfully and suggestively employed transcripts from political trials. It cited fabricated conversations and secret meetings between disciples of Trotsky and others later condemned as “traitors, spies, and terrorists” as if they had actually occurred and had been written down on the spot. From this the authors inferred the existence of an enormous conspiracy, whose goal was to destroy the first Socialist state of workers and farmers. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed and, like all similar works of propaganda, served as the foundation for wholesale slaughter.
For a reader unfamiliar with these events, it was easy to believe that sabotage units, conspiracies, and even cunning imperialistic spies in fact existed, that everything presented as historical fact was indeed true. There was of course no mention of the phony political trials that took place in the Soviet Union practically from its inception; that they were carried out upon the order of the steeled man of steel, Stalin; and that all confessions were acquired by means of unspeakable torture, signed beforehand by hangman interrogators, and then under threat of further torture repeated by the broken prisoners at their trials.
The Necessity of Faith
Since time immemorial, man has sought to explain the connection between himself and everything that is remote or estranged; he wants to uncover his own origin and the origin of the world. During different periods, people in different parts of the world hit upon a satisfactory explanation, which was handed down from generation to generation because they believed it was incontrovertible.
Faith helped them live in a world full of mystery, of inexplicable phenomena, when at times there was enough food whereas at others they were hungry, where one day a person was alive and the next he was some kind of lifeless, cold matter.
In various places on our planet, people accepted events as the work of someone or something much more powerful. One could perhaps implore the higher being to revoke his decisions, but even so, times would come when one could no longer implore. One must die. But while he was alive he could try to please the powerful one to avoid suffering while on earth and then be allowed live on in some other realm — perhaps beneath the earth, perhaps above it — or perhaps he would be reincarnated in another being or an inanimate object. And then this object would be revered.
Since long ago, the world was, in the imaginations of our forefathers, inhabited by gods and goddesses, powerful beings both good and evil. Some of these dwelled nearby, in trees, animals, or water; others inhabited the heights and revealed themselves only in the form of lightning, thunder, sunlight, or illness, which drew near from the unknown. In his relationship with the powerful forces, man was full of humility; nevertheless, he believed he would one day enjoy some sort of beatific condition that went by various names — heaven, nirvana — but was always a condition in which a person was happy, where all pain, all cares, all fears of the end ceased. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was even supposed that at one time we had lived in such a state, and only our own reckless longing for knowledge had deprived us of it. The longing for knowledge, however, although stigmatized, persisted.
Gradually the individual gods lost their concrete forms or retreated in the face of one most powerful God until they disappeared entirely or turned into his servants or lingered on as water nymphs, sprites, naiads, genies, or angels.
While the gods changed their form, the human need for faith changed only little. Man wanted to believe there was someone above him who would judge all his deeds, who would reward good and punish evil, who would right the wrongs, who would even arrange it so that after death he would encounter those he had loved.
Although human societies arose at different times and places, and they developed various and oftentimes very dissimilar religions, many things connected them: All religions had their own rituals. They celebrated the festival of the solstice, the arrival of rain, the metamorphosis of a boy into a man, the joining of man and woman, and the dead on their final journey. All of this persisted for generations, and it never occurred to anyone to doubt the usefulness and necessity of observing the rituals.
Every religion, every deity, had its own chosen people or caste, its own shamans, monks, lamas, or priests who ensured that all the prescribed commandments were obeyed.
Religion required unswerving faith in everything it claimed, in everything it demanded, even in what it promised. Only the insane, the outcast, or the blaspheming heretic could not believe.
As thousands of years went by, man continued in his aspirations, which caused his banishment from paradise. He wanted to know and discover new and better explanations for phenomena in his world. Reason appeared against the enduring faith in the constancy of ancient explanations. Reason announced that everything could be subject to doubt; it was necessary to examine and explore everything. Even the ancient Greek philosophers reached the conclusion that man was after all part of nature and like everything else was subject to old age and then death. Not even the Greek materialist philosophers doubted the existence of immortal gods, but they assumed that immortal beings cared little about the fate of mortals. They themselves had to seek how to avoid anguish from nonbeing, from the meaninglessness of their existence, and at the same time how to escape this meaninglessness.
In the seventeenth century, however, thinkers began to emphasize the significance of reason over the long-standing conclusions issuing from faith.
During the Enlightenment, reason became the instrument that should guide a meaningful life. In subsequent centuries, reason achieved unexpected successes. There is no sense enumerating them, but reason, along with its child science and its grandchild technology, altered essentially the conditions and utility of life. As knowledge and understanding developed, certain religious dogmas began to be doubted. Science arrived with a new conception of time; it began to explain the origin of man and the origin of the earth and the universe in an entirely different way. It began to investigate and finally even break down matter. Gradually, at least in people’s everyday lives, the inexplicable diminished, and reason began to insinuate itself and take the place of God.