From the Other Shore

XIX

district police officer, in every landowner. The intoxication of absolute power takes hold of every level of the famous hierarchy of fourteen ranks. In all the actions of the authorities, and in all relations of the higher to the lower, there appears a brazen shamelessness, an arrogant boasting of one’s own unaccountability, and the insulting awareness that the individual will endure anything: the triple military recruitment, the law concerning foreign travel permits, the corrective birch rods in the Engineering Institute. Just as Little Russia original: "Малороссія"; a historical term for Ukraine endured the state of serfdom in the 18th century; just as all of Rus' eventually came to believe that people could be bought and sold, and no one ever asked upon what legal basis all this was done, not even those who were being sold. Our government is more confident in itself and more free than the government in Turkey or Persia; nothing stops it, no past holds it back. It has renounced its own, it has no concern for the European; it does not respect nationality, it knows nothing of universal human education, and it fights against the present. Previously, at the very least, the government was ashamed before its neighbors and learned from them; now it considers itself called to serve as an example for all oppressors; now it is the one doing the teaching.

You and I have seen the most terrifying development of the imperial system. We grew up under terror, under the black wings of the secret police, within its claws;