2 quotes from Vasily Grossman (1905-64)

 And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent.  Nor were they merely obedient witnesses:  when ordered to they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favor of it amid a hubbub of voices.  There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience….The extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyze the human spirit throughout whole continents….There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil—anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power. 

-Vasily Grossman:  Life and Fate

  Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom.  Consciousness first weakens and then disappears.  The life-processes--respiration, metabolism, circulation--continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery:  consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.

  The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the Sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their color and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished.  The universe inside a person has ceased to exist.  This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people.  It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people.  But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people.  What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life is its uniqueness.  The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity.  Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.      -ibid

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  Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told Grossman that his book could not be published for two or three hundred years:^[12]

I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down.... Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?... Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?^{[13]    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman}

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