What about the trials? The purges? Trials, purges, they are words you have read somewhere,...

Cross: What about the trials? The purges? Zharkov: Trials, purges, they are words you have read somewhere, Cross. My trial was so grotesque, my hours of interrogation so terrible that I was numb. It was a kind of frontal lobotomy without anesthetic. And the labor camps, where men, good communists' old fighters, men who believed in the dignity of man above all else, were used as drought animals to pull logs on frozen feet. That this could be the result of all I had committed my life to. Cross: But, baby, at that moment, didn't you realize what was happening? Zharkov: At that moment I tried to understand what had happened to me. Most of us there were communists, not Stalinists. That is why we were there. Nothing had happened to make me renounce myself. I was still a communist. Stalin couldn't take it away from me. And now the dull, gray stupidity that sends the tanks into Prague because it has no imagination, it can't take it from me either. I am still a communist.