8
PARTISAN REVIEW
well that I was not a spy. But for the government, the very fact that I
was a spokesman for Jewish emigration , the movement of human
rights, was high treason . The officials had no doubts. Hence I was a
criminal. In Stalin's time they simply could have killed me . But it is
interesting to see that today the system works differently; they do not
kill you, they go into long, long investigations. Seventeen investiga–
tors, day and night, are interrogating you; they prepare 15,000
pages, fifty-two volumes. For what? Simply to show themselves what
a legitimate state it is .
How insecure they must be to have to protect themselves with
all these pages which in advance one knows are a lie . And they do
not publish them. They put a seal on each of these volumes, "Top
Secret," so nobody outside their own offices will see them. And after
that they sentence you to a long term, put you into prison, into a
camp, into a punishment cell, isolating you from all the world so no
one will hear you . What more do they need? Every day they will be
trying to seduce you, to make you say that they are right and that
you are not. And for this they develop sophisticated systems. They
have eighteen levels of feeding you: each time you will be getting less
and less food in order to turn you into a kind oflaboratory rat so that
your stomach will make you say "Yes, I agree, let me sign what you
ask me to sign." Why do they need this?
At the time, you understand that to some extent they are ab–
solutely right in what they're trying to do, because, after all, in such
a system, stability depends fully on the fact that people accept their
power. That the majority of people will be the majority of slaves,
who feel self-respect only through belonging to that state and not
from understanding that they have some rights of their own. That
with such a system, missiles, camps, and the
Gulag
are of course very
important for stability, but much more important is the mentality of
the people . And they are right to be afraid of the individual. Because
I believe, and all my experience indicates - though it contradicts all
those compliments which I constantly hear about unusual courage
and outstanding fighters - that each of us who knows what he is
struggling for, who has some firm moral principles, some framework
in which he exists and on which he stands, has enough resources in–
side himself-or traditional religious resources which he can get
from God, whichever you prefer-to mobilize and to enable him to
resist.
I think the first and most important step in resisting is that you
