WRITERS IN EXILE
509
Crowds of sincere pacifists, seized with a legitimate anxiety
over the existence of life and culture, do not see farther than
their own noses, and perhaps are not able, in their fear, to make
out the true culprits behind the catastrophic state of today's
world. Why does the Soviet regime exist? I could have asked this
simple and seemingly inoffensive question there, at home, in a
calm and academic way, but it so impudently attempts to
shoulder its way into the aristocratic company of eternal ques–
tions that it undoubtedly would have led me directly to a mad–
house.
1£
I had tried
to
express my thoughts publicly or write
an essay on this topic in
samizdat,
I would have been provided
with a minimum, seven-year amputation of my freedom. But
since I consider going to prison voluntarily to be a perverted
form of suicide, the instinct of self-preservation and the capacity
and joy of living in freedom led me to the West. And here I can
freely discuss this accursed topic: Why, then, does the Soviet
regime exist? But without a correlation of this not so simple
question with the categories of good and evil, a more or less
intelligible answer is impossible.
My encounter with the West, with the best and free part
of the world, to which alone the hopes of mankind can be tied
today, has helped me to realize and to feel the fullness of an
opinion prevalent now: that our entire civilization is rubbish–
even with all the wonders of technological progress and the
unprecedented high standards of living in the developed
countries! I don' t want to go into an analysis here of its dark
aspects and discuss the decay of morals, the degeneration of
culture and art, the monstrous ecological revelations, and the
contradictions of capitalism.
Having successfully escaped from Dracula, from the Soviet
regime, I suddenly began to encounter its closest blood relatives
in the amazingly beautiful expanses of the New and the Old
Worlds. Trembling with horror and loathing, I see
Sovieticus
draculat
in the talentless specimens of mass culture that truly
ravage the human spirit, in the obtuseness and blindness of
independent politicians surrendering one after another the
bastions of freedom to world totalitarianism, not without any
resistance, but without any special pressure from it. I encounter
relatives of the Soviet Dracula among the members of the Red
Brigades and among terrorists of many other colors, and God only
