I had other invaluable help setting up meetings with remarkable men and women. In Russia, I could not have done this work without the aid of Dmitry Uzlaner; I cannot thank him enough. In Slovakia, Juraj Šúst and Timo Križka introduced me to the world of the Slovak Catholic underground. Ryszard Legutko and Dariusz Karłowicz were key to my work in Poland. In fact, Ryszard’s great book The Demon in Democracy is an invaluable guide to understanding the soft totalitarianism of our time.
Once again, I have the opportunity to express gratitude to my literary agent, Gary Morris of the David Black Agency, who, for the nearly two decades he has been in my life, has been everything a writer could hope for. This is the second book I have done with Bria Sandford, my editor at Sentinel. I appreciate her confidence in me and my ideas. I also owe a debt of thanks to my friend Dewey Scandurro, for his prayers and advice on the drafts of this book, as he has offered during the writing of almost all of my books.
Thanks also to my wife, Julie, and children, Matthew, Lucas, and Nora, for their patience during my lengthy absences reporting this book. Kids, these stories are for you and your generation more than for your mother’s and mine.
Finally I want to thank Frederica Mathewes-Green, one of my oldest and dearest friends. Her spiritual father was the Orthodox priest George Calciu, which is how I first learned of him and of the torture camp at Piteşti, in Romania. For over twenty-five years, Frederica has supported me with her friendship, her wise counsel, and through her willingness to listen to me and pray for me through my struggles, in particular with this project.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts; abr. by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (NY: Perennial, 1983). Quote taken from the author’s introduction to the abridgment (no page number).
2. “In New Biography, Pope Benedict XVI Laments Modern ‘Anti-Christian Creed,’” National Catholic Register, May 4, 2020, ncregister.com/daily-news/in-new-biography-pope-benedict-xvi-laments-modern-anti-christian-creed.
3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies!,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Selected Writings, 1947–2005, eds. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 558.
CHAPTER ONE: KOLAKOVIĆ THE PROPHET
1. Václav Vaško, “Professor Kolaković: Myths and Reality,” trans. Google, Impulz no. 3 (2006), impulzrevue.sk/article.php?135.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY: Harcourt, 1973), viii.
3. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (NY: Vintage, 1990), 6.
4. René Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (NY: Orbis, 2001), 179.
5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 62.
6. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 62.
7. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 5.
8. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 73.
9. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies!,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Selected Writings, 1947–2005, eds. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 556.
10. Solzhenitsyn, “Lies!,” 559.
CHAPTER TWO: OUR PRE-TOTALITARIAN CULTURE
1. Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950–2008 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 474.
2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts; abr. by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (NY: Perennial, 1983), 39.
3. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 36–37.
4. Slezkine, House of Government, 40.
5. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (NY: Anchor, 2013), 392.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY: Harcourt, 1973), 478.
7. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 317.
8. Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk), “It’s telling that, in the year of 2019, the notion that one purpose of civics education might be to . . .” Twitter, September 13, 2019, 10:59 a.m., twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1172540349622800384.
9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 330.
10. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 332.
11. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NY: Vintage, 1970), 492.
12. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 502.
13. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (Lexington, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2010), loc. 11 of 201, Kindle.
14. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 333.
15. Jake Silverstein, “Why We Published the 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019, nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.
16. Jeff Barrus, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins Pulitzer Prize for 1619 Project,” Pulitzer Center, May 4, 2019, pulitzercenter.org/blog/nikole-hannah-jones-wins-pulitzer-prize-1619-project.
17. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 353.
18. Zack Goldberg (@zachg932), “1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. . . .” Twitter, May 28, 2019, 1:32 p.m., twitter.com/zachg932/status/1133440945201061888.
19. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 351.
20. N. V. Krylenko, “The Party Crushed,” in The Great Terror: A Reassessment, ed. Robert Conquest (NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 249.
21. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 339.
22. Michael Kruse, “I Need Loyalty,” Politico, March 3, 2018, politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/06/donald-trump-loyalty-staff-217227.
23. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38.
24. Hunter, Change the World, 41.
25. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (NY: Vintage, 1990), 3.
26. Silvester Krčméry, MD, This Saved Us: How to Survive Brainwashing (self-pub., 1996), 222.
27. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 440.
CHAPTER THREE: PROGRESSIVISM AS RELIGION
1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Viking, 1987), 179.
2. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NY: Vintage, 1970), 504.
3. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Harper & Row, 1984), 257.
4. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 107.
5. President George W. Bush, “Bush: No Justice without Freedom,” CNN, January 20, 2005, cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/bush.transcript/index.html.
6. John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 273.
7. Slezkine, House of Government, 54.
8. Martin Latsis, quoted in Anna Geifman, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 126.
9. James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna, “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice,” Areo, December 18, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/.
10. Michael Hanby, “The Brave New World of Same-Sex Marriage,” The Federalist, February 19, 2014, thefederalist.com/2014/02/19/the-brave-new-world-of-same-sex-marriage/.
11. Pope
