“I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the Party is beneath the dignity of any man. And the Party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city. “ —from Dr Zhivago
—” —from Dr Zhivago”
... So I went for a quick refresher on Dr Zhivago.
Down the rabits hole and a longish bio on Boris Pasternak.
Yes, a communist to the core, but an incredible individual.
“In April 1934 Osip Mandelstam recited his “Stalin Epigram” to Pasternak. After listening, Pasternak told Mandelstam: “I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they’ve begun to pick people up. I’m afraid the walls have ears and perhaps even these benches on the boulevard here may be able to listen and tell tales. So let’s make out that I heard nothing.”
On the night of 14 May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested at his home based on a warrant signed by NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda. Devastated, Pasternak went immediately to the offices of Izvestia and begged Nikolai Bukharin to intercede on Mandelstam’s behalf.”
In a 1958 letter to a friend in West Germany, Pasternak wrote, “She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a gruelling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak
Thank you for pointing me to this bit of history.
Difficult to believe that some here advocate for Putin and this way of life.