The late Josef Stalin had got it right, in a way his successors have never managed. He knew that repression is indivisible, far more so than Litvinov’s peace. If you want to do the thing properly, you have to be prepared to kill millions, to torture, to banish, to terrorize, so that even your closest friends dread the knock on the door at 5 a.m.
In comparison, the Brezhnevs, the Andropovs, and the Chernenkos are mere amateurs. One would be pardoned for thinking, nevertheless, that the legal apparatus of repression was by now long since in a state of absolute perfection, the blades of the penal code honed to razor sharpness.
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