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doubt prefers the Soviet regime to the other group. What if both are
right? What if either group, if it came to power, turned out to be
worse than the Soviet regime?
That kind of thing happened, after all, in the case of the Bolshe–
viks when they came to power. Instead of annihilating the previous
regime as they had at first wanted to do, they strengthened and
improved it. In his book,
Russia Under the Old Regime,
Richard Pipes
has shown how much the Bolsheviks learned from their predecessors
and persecutors. The Bolsheviks' notion of what government should
be was a mirror image of the czarist regime, but an intensified one.
What happened was this: the czarist regime had, quite naturally,
shown the Bolsheviks its worst side - the police apparatus. When the
Bolsheviks came to power, they replicated that aspect of the czarist
regime that was so well known to them, and the police apparatus
was elevated to the state level. But there was a difference. During
their oppositionist phase, the Bolsheviks had become familiar with
all the defects of that apparatus - defects thanks to which they had
been able to overcome it. And when they acceded to power, they got
rid of those shortcomings, so that under Stalin the police machinery
came close to absolute perfection.
There is a legend about a knight who, upon returning to his
native city after slaying a dragon, so frightened all the children who
saw him that they took to their heels. Badly shaken by this un–
expected kind of welcome, the savior of his country looked at his
reflection in a puddle and saw, growing on his own shoulders, the
dragon's head that he had recently cut off.
I cannot apply this analogy directly to the present situation, but
I can extend it: today the dragons' heads sprout not after a victory
but during the very struggle. And I fear that the knights of the
Russian dissident movement, made ruthless by the long struggle
and by frequent defeats, are sprouting dragons' heads even more
rapidly than did the dragon slayer of the legend.
3. Ideology: the KGB's Fuel
But let us come back to real, natural-born dragons. Upon what
do they subsist?
The Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth gobbled up criminals.
Besides criminals, once a year he got a tribute from Athens: seven
