Lidiya Chukovskaya, a writer whose husband, a physicist, was executed in 1938 at the age of thirty-one, raged against this habit of attempting to make sense of the absurd: The truth was too primitive and too bloody. The regime had attacked its citizens for no imaginable reason and was beating them, torturing them, and executing them. How were we to understand the reason for such whimsy? If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they were doing it “just because,” that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn
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