The denial of personal responsibility took a political turn as well. The outbursts of revolutionary violence rocking postwar Europe—the purges and assassinations in Lenin’s Russia, for example—were rationalized as a necessary phase toward a utopian vision. An official of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, explained thus: “We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”59 As Paul Johnson writes, shortly after seizing power Lenin “abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal
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