Monumental Propaganda Read Online Free PDF

his smokeless pipe and looked at Aglaya affectionately. The first time, she failed to appreciate the situation and tried to talk to him, but scarcely had she parted her lips when he instantly disappeared, vanished into thin air. During his subsequent appearances she made no attempt to speak. She remained silent, and he remained silent, but she could feel that they were communicating with each other without words, and it was far better than with words.
    Afterward, when she recovered, she retained in her memory the feeling that an extremely important conversation had taken place between them and although she could not recall its content, she realized that an absolute truth had been revealed to her, a truth beside which all words and all human knowledge paled into insignificance.

7
    In itself Dolgov was just an average town. A bit too big for a district center, but not big enough for a regional center. It had a few factories, agroindustrial trusts and combines, shops, an oil tank farm, a service station, a poultry farm, a district Party committee, a district Soviet executive committee, a public prosecutor’s office, a police station, a sobering-up station and a branch of the KGB. In the very center, on the opposite side of the square from the district committee of the CPSU, before you reached the collective farm market, there were even the remains of some structure that people referred to either as the kremlin or the arcade. At the time here described, it contained the district public utilities office, a dressmaking and tailoring establishment, an automobile repair shop and the “Hardware” shop. Standing nearby was the Church of SS. Kozma and Damian, which was repeatedly being closed as part of the campaign against religion and opened again out of economic considerations—while religion might have been regarded as opium for the people, it nonetheless contributed a lot of money to the budget. But then genuine opium generates a pretty decent income too.
    The house in which Aglaya lived was built in 1946 on her instructions for the district Party’s ruling class, or nomenklatura, as it was known. After the war they were more in need of housing than were simple Soviet people. Of course, they were always more in need. The further things went, the greater their need, and the less there was, the greater their need of it. However, after the war they were particularly needy, because the Germans had destroyed the nomenklatura apartment houses (since they were the best in the town) as they withdrew. Only the mansion in which the children’s home was located had survived, thanks to an oversight on the part of the Germans.
    There were no other decent houses in the town, and it would have been genuinely indecent for the Party’s nomenklatura workers to live in poor-quality houses, but even more indecent for them to live in communal flats. And not just because the Party’s nomenklatura workers did not know how to coexist in crowded conditions, but because then the details of their lives would have become known to simple Soviet people and that must never happen. Living apart from other citizens, the nomenklatura of those times (just like its counterpart in these times) had to appear and did appear to be a special breed of people, superior, mysterious and possessed of the entire body of human knowledge. Our fears and weaknesses were foreign to them. They understood the secrets of our being, what was and what would be, but they had no interests apart from constant concern for the good of the motherland and our well-being. And if they needed living conditions a little better than ours, then it was exclusively in order that they might think about us without being distracted by anything irrelevant. And we, who thought only of ourselves and our own petty affairs, could do that in any conditions.
    The house where Aglaya lived had been intended to be a good one. It was quite unique in the town, with comforts hitherto