Nathalia tells the old teacher that “the shadow of autocracy” hangs over each Russian, much as does its more substantial modern counterpart, the Soviet MVD. Razumov is another Slavophile who believes that Russia is sacred. But later Conrad returns to the subject of Russian incomprehensibility when he says that Western ears “are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe.” Koestler’s two novels considered here describe Russia after the deluge. The bloodbaths have changed the names and faces, but the same moral negation is there. More accurately, there is not even a negation, for there is no positive assertion of moral values to negate. The doctrine that history has no conscience had removed for the Soviets the need for moral reference points. As a result, they had sailed without the ethical ballast that Rubashov, at the end of his life, decided was essential. In his judgment this was the fatal break in the logical chain which caused the betrayal of the revolution which Mailer mourned in _Barbary Shore_. In this case, perhaps, history is character. The span of events covered by these novels might even be graphed. The line would form itself into two low plateaus separated by a single tremendous peak. This eminence would represent the ill-fated revolt against tyranny. On either side would be the depths in which a people was submerged with not quite passive suffering under a rigid, repressive rule made possible by a long historical pattern and the mass conditioning to obedience which it produced. UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA: A SELF-PORTRAIT The Boers of South Africa are presented, especially in Paton’s novels, as a simple and stern people who are also good fighters and good haters. Subduing part of a continent and making it their own, they regard themselves as the elect among the children of men quite as much as do the Slavophiles. Yet these Afrikaners suffer from a curious case of schizophrenia. Singled out by the Almighty, they are nonetheless so fearful of the colored population that they repress them as harshly as any European nation ever did its colonial peoples. Early in _Too Late the Phalarope_ Paton epitomizes this national group: