SOURCE: "Totalitarian logic: Stalin on linguistics," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 16-36.

In the following essay, Gray examines Stalin 's position on linguistics in Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

No, no: arrests vary very widely in form. In 1926 Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, obtained through the Comintern two front-row tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. Interrogator Klegel was courting her at the time and she invited him to go with her. They sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over he took her—straight to the Lubyanka.

(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, chapter 1, 'Arrest')

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

(Genesis 11:7)

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Confronting evil men, areas of human experience are often deemed sacrosanct in order to preserve them from the minds we are casting out. Thus it is a commonly held belief...