Feelings of guilt could be unbearable. After Khrushchev’s secret speech, Aleksandr Fadeev, a committed Stalinist and much-feared literary bureaucrat, went on an alcoholic binge. While drunk, he confessed to a friend that as head of the Writers’ Union, he had sanctioned the arrests of many writers he knew to be innocent. Fadeev killed himself the following day. He allegedly left a one-sentence suicide letter, addressed to the Central Committee: “The bullet fired was meant for Stalin’s policies, for Zhdanov’s aesthetics, for Lysenko’s genetics.”
