Collectivization and Its Failure

Collectivization is described as an erroneous and unsuccessful measure whose failure could not be admitted. The effort to conceal that failure, the passage argues, turned political error into a wider assault on people’s ability to think, judge, and trust what they saw. Its significance lies not only in the policy’s failure but in the coercive falsehood built around it.

Failure and Concealment

The account states directly that collectivization failed and that acknowledging the error was considered impossible. Concealment therefore became more than a defense of one measure: people had to be cured, by every means of terrorism, of the habit of thinking and judging for themselves. The violence is presented as a means of disabling independent judgment, not simply punishing opposition.

That assault demanded that people see what did not exist and assert the opposite of what their own eyes told them. The conflict is thus between imposed statements and ordinary perception: political authority does not merely require obedience but compels people to deny the evidence of their senses. The passage connects this enforced untruth to the exceptional cruelty of the Yezhov period.

Institutions and the Denial of Choice

The same logic extends from terror to public institutions. The account places beside the violence the promulgation of a constitution never meant to be applied and the introduction of elections that violated the very principle of free choice. In this sequence, official promises and procedures remain in place while their stated meaning is emptied out: a constitution exists without intended application, and elections exist without genuine choice.

These examples broaden the argument beyond the concealment of collectivization’s failure. They show how the inability to admit error is associated with a political order that contradicts its own public forms and demands that people affirm the contradiction. The passage’s emphasis is on the resulting damage to independent thought and judgment.

War as a Contrast to the Lie

The remembered outbreak of war supplies a stark reversal. Its real horrors, real dangers, and real menace of death are described as a blessing when set against what the passage calls the inhuman reign of the lie. War brings relief not because its suffering is denied, but because its dangers are real: they break the spell of the dead letter.

That relief is said to have been felt not only by people in concentration camps but by everyone at home and at the front. The account concludes with people taking a deep breath and throwing themselves into a mortal struggle with joy and rapture. The contrast does not make war benign; it shows how unbearable political falsehood has become when even the certainty of real death can feel liberating by comparison.