They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked—the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied. To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet
