My brother Evgeni Yakovlovich used to say that the decisive part in the subjection of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word “Revolution,” which none of them could bear to give up. It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital punishment.
—Nadezhda Mandelshtam, in Hope Against Hope

Why is it that nearly eighty years after the Bolshevik Revolution—an event that did more to shape the history of this century than any other—we are still so reluctant to come to terms with the full scale of the moral horrors that followed in its wake? Why is it that we rarely, if ever, speak of a Soviet holocaust? After all, the brute outlines of this bloody history—not only in their general import, but often in specific numbers and details, too—have been known to us for a very long time. Similarly, the nature of the Soviet regime has long ceased to be a mystery, and the measures taken by Lenin, Stalin, and their successors to suppress all domestic political dissent while creating support abroad for the regime’s criminal policies have passed into the folklore of the modern era.

Yet virtually every increase in our knowledge of the actualities and consequences of the Soviet system has also been met with, in the West, by an apparatus