Fyodor Dostoyevsky

From Witness, Whittaker Chambers 1952

Almost until the very end, I felt that there must be something human about Colonel Bykov if I could only reach it. For without it he was a caricature. But no man is a caricature. At last I gave up, chiefly from lack of interest. I decided that in his case the caricature actually was most of the man. It was a special kind of caricature. It was one of the images in which Communism creates those who have never known anything else. Most of Bykov�s life had been lived under Communism. He believed that he was constantly enveloped by the American secret police because he could not imagine a society in which the secret police were not everywhere. If he could have imagined anything so badly organized, he would have been revolted. He was an awed admirer of Nechayev, the 19th-century Russian who carried the logic of revolution to its limit, teaching (Lenin, among others) that murder, kidnapping, arson, robbery and blackmail, all crimes, are justified if they serve the socialist cause. From Bykov I first learned the name of Nechayev, who also served Dostoievsky as the terrible prototype of Pyotr Stepanovitch Veskhovensky in The Possessed.

New York : Random House 1952, p. 438.

From The Twenty-Year Revolution, Chesly Manly 1954

Whittaker Chambers, a leader in the Soviet underground apparatus in Washington from 1934 until he repudiated communism in 1938, . . . This courageous, Dostoevskian genius . . . tells the story of the amazing Ware cell in the government, which was one of at least four Soviet espionage rings known to have operated in Washington, only two of which have been exposed.²

2. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee Report, August 24, 1953.

Chicago : Henry Regnery 1954, pp. 38-39.