inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other. . . . Oh Lord, if only there were some device which would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and ripped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul. . . . No angel will appear now to snatch Abraham’s sword from his hand. My fatal destiny shall be fulfilled. . . . I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. . . . I ask you one last time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise). 91 And as Nikolai Ezhov, who presided over Bukharin’s execution, later stated on the eve of his own, During the 25 years of my party work I have fought honorably against enemies and have exterminated them. . . . I purged 14,000 Chekists. But my great guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few of them. . . . All around me were enemies of the people, my enemies. . . . Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips. 92 The revolution had finally gotten around to eating its own children—or rather, its own parents, because Hodl and especially Perchik were much more likely to be arrested and shot than the youthful members of the “first Soviet generation.” The revolution was as patricidal as the original revolutionaries had been, and no one was as puzzled by this as the original revolutionaries themselves. According to Hope Ulanovskaia, who had recently returned from the United States, Once, when after yet another arrest, I asked: “What is going on? Why? What for?” your father [i.e., her husband, an agent of the Main Intelligence Directorate] replied calmly: “Why are you so upset? When I told you how the White officers were being shot in the Crimea, you weren’t upset, were you? When the bourgeoisie and the kulaks were being exterminated, you used to justify it, didn’t you? But now that it’s our turn, you ask: How, why? This is the way it’s been from the very beginning.” I reasoned with him: “I understand that it’s terrible when people are killed, but before we always knew that it was for the sake of the revolution. Now nobody is