In Russia they began by saying they had to hate and kill in order to clear the land of all classes hostile to a socialist world, in order to make room for a happier life. But hatred becomes a habit, grows, expands monstrously until it cannot find enough victims. Before the Bolsheviks even gained a far-off glimpse of a happier life their hatred had become an end in itself. They began, by hating, as they thought, rationally; they finished by hating and killing themselves. The proletariat and peasantry, instructed by the Communists, began by hating the Czar, the aristocrats, bankers, factory managers, engineers, technicians, schoolteachers, dentists, undertakers, physicians, lawyers, priests and policemen, everyone who occupied any position noticeably superior to that of the masses. It took them about ten years to slaughter this lot, and then they began hating and killing the better-off farmers. I was there during the final mopping up of the first victims and again for the extermination of the second group, and as the last of the identifiable enemies of the Bolsheviks disappeared in the cellars of the G.P.U., or in the wastes of Siberia, we in Moscow used to discuss quite seriously what these furious haters were going to do when they ran out of “classes” to hate. It was no joke. It had become indispensable to Bolshevik life to have an object of hatred and when the object was exterminated another had to be found. We guessed they would have to begin hating and killing themselves, and we were right. To us it was not surprising. When you lived among them, you realized that Communist “class hatred” is hatred of anyone who gets along better than oneself and there is just as much hatred of Communists by Communists as of capitalists. In no organization has there ever been more back-stabbing, poisoning, strangling, murderous mutual hatred of one another than in the Communist Party, from the malignant Russian Central Committee through all its verminous offspring in the Comintern. They used to boast of the “monolithic” character of the Russian Communist Party. It was like a block of granite without a crevice. The Russian Jacobins declared they would never commit the error of their French forebears who found they could not stop killing when once they had started to kill one another. For years the outside world observed this Bolshevik self-restraint and there was much fear of it.