Unsurprising, given the one thing that regime could not allow to prevail was truth, documentary or literary. Soviets ultimately used communism as a distraction

Unsurprising, given the one thing that regime could not allow to prevail was truth, documentary or literary. Soviets ultimately used communism as a distraction for their totalitarian aim, which was dominion by creating a mental hall of mirrors that isolated each person from their own humanity and subordinated them to the "state," which itself was by every other account of regular purges and fear, just another kind of multi-layered chaotic hell as well. Once you were arguing, to engage at all meant you were already implicated and compromised by your "class," as the ideology and intellectual conflict was not their real tool, it was the bait for the trap that identified potential people with the instinct to resist, as the true aim of a totalitarian movement is to destroy all possible resistance by unmooring people from any concept or belief in truth. That is, for good men to do nothing. It's the intellectual strategy of the same kind of people today, to destabilize, leverage chaos, and reduce people to their animal level political instincts instead of allowing us to use our higher capacity for principle, order, and reason. That's the great game, between order and chaos. Solzhenitsyn (and earlier, Hannah Arendt) wrote a warning for all time about the tactics of what is an essential and ancient evil. I'm kind of what you would call "the first to stop clapping." The things people talk about in the culture wars today are the same thing. Without a meta-understanding of them, we're going to fall prey to the same tactics.