As he explained years later, he had, like the Twenty-Five Thousanders before him, deliberately allowed himself to succumb to a form of intellectual blindness. Kravchenko spoke for many when he described it: “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind. You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”62 The language of the propaganda also helped mask reality: We communists, among ourselves, steered around the subject; or we dealt with it in the high-flown euphemisms of party lingo. We
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