“For the party’s sake you can and must at twenty-four hours’ notice change all your convictions and force yourself to believe that white is black”

The maxim “For the party’s sake you can and must at twenty-four hours’ notice change all your convictions and force yourself to believe that white is black” gives a stark verbal form to the Soviet system’s effort to command both public speech and private belief. At issue is not simply lying for political advantage: the demand reaches inward, requiring people to treat what they know to be false as real. Its compressed opposition between white and black makes the operation sound absurdly simple, while the deadline of twenty-four hours turns ideological conversion into an order that can be imposed at any moment.

Wording and Attribution

The sentence appears in Carrère’s discussion of how Soviet history could be revised after the fact. He attributes it not to George Orwell, as a reader might expect, but to Pyatakov, a companion of Vladimir Lenin. The attribution places the maxim inside the political world it describes: the destruction of truth is not an external accusation imposed by a later novelist, but a command Carrère traces to a figure from the revolutionary movement itself.

The phrase’s paired verbs make its force precise. A person must first change convictions, then go further and “force yourself” to believe the new account. The first demand concerns allegiance; the second makes the individual an agent of their own coercion. The abrupt black-and-white image strips away the language of policy or technical debate. What the system requires is a reversal of perception itself.

The Political Mechanism

Carrère introduces the quotation amid examples of official history being physically corrected. After Lavrentiy Beria was executed, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to remove the entry praising him and replace it with one on the Bering Strait. The alphabetical sequence remained intact, but the person who had occupied that place in the book was made to seem never to have existed. After Nikita Khrushchev’s fall, libraries likewise needed to cut One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from old copies of Novy mir. In each case, an altered record did not merely communicate a new official position; it staged the disappearance of the old one.

The maxim explains the human counterpart to that editorial surgery. Carrère describes the Soviet Union as carrying totalitarianism further than Nazi Germany at this decisive point: people were made not only to repeat that black was white, but eventually to believe it. The intended result is a world in which an official account can override direct knowledge. A change in doctrine becomes a demand to change what one remembers seeing.

Memory and the Surreal State

For Carrère, suppressing reality means suppressing memory. He connects the falsification of the historical record to the collectivization of land, the millions of kulaks killed or deported, the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the purges of the 1930s. These events were denied, yet their absence from official history could not erase the experience of people who had lived through them. Children knew that officials had taken their fathers away and that those fathers never returned; they also learned that speaking about it was dangerous, especially for the children of people branded public enemies. Silence became a way of behaving as if the event had never occurred.

Carrère presents the resulting society as both monstrous and monstrously comic: official language could declare poverty, brutality, and inefficiency to be the highest good while people were expected to accept the declaration as reality. He connects that contradiction to underground works including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Alexander Zinoviev’s Yawning Heights, and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur. The maxim is therefore more than an example of political hypocrisy. It names the impossible project of making a fabricated world prevail over lived experience—and the surreal, unstable world produced by that effort.

A Later Political Echo

Near the book’s end, the maxim’s conflict between belief and political position gains a personal echo in Carrère’s portrait of Eduard Limonov. Carrère writes that Limonov would say and do everything Vladimir Putin says and does, or worse, if he held Putin’s place. Instead, Limonov occupies the incongruous position of an opposition figure defending values such as democracy and human rights that he does not believe in, alongside honest people whose outlook he has long despised. This is not presented as a direct repetition of Pyatakov’s order, but it returns the reader to the question the maxim makes unavoidable: how political convictions are stated, inhabited, or disavowed when a person’s position changes. The sentence’s lasting force lies in that conjunction of public words and inward belief: the demand is complete only when the imposed account has been made to feel true.