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Letters are a valuable primary source as they often contain unfiltered thoughts.

Faulkner's "the past is never dead" comes to mind.
"My grandmother always said that we don’t know how to think about the future; we must turn to the past. I started to wonder about the story of my life, of how I was born, of how things were before I was there."

I appreciate that the author focuses on ordinary people and their personal stories and not on the larger politics.

“You can have vengeance or peace, but you can’t have both.”
Great quote.

The distinction between the private and the public often becomes deeper in a totalitarian environment. By arranging little private parties with friends, people try to abstract from the restrictive reality of the outside world.

The distinction between the private and the public often becomes deeper in the atmosphere of totalitarianism. By arranging little private parties with friends, people try to abstract from the restrictive reality of the outside world.

"The party program of October 1961 included a new ideological formulation on the national question: the drawing together (sblizhenie) of Soviet nationalities would ultimately produce fusion (sliianie), resulting in a single Soviet identity."
An attempt that failed.

The British were enabled to make a great surge forward when the Poles, running short of resources to pursue their advanced program of penetrating Germany's machine cyphers, saw nothing for it but to turn over virtually the whole of their astonishing results to Paris and London a mere month before the opening of hostilities in 1939.

At several points he [Mossadegh] might have declared victory and made a deal. In the summer of 1952, for example, he was an unassailable national hero. He had been returned to power by a spontaneous mass uprising and had won a great victory over the British at the World Court. President Truman was on his side. A more pragmatic leader might have seized on this moment, but Mossadegh was not a pragmatist.

With this unanimous vote, the United States gave its final goahead for Operation Ajax, or Operation Boot, as the British continued to call it. The governments in London and Washington [the Eisenhower administration] were finally united in their enthusiasm. One looked forward to recovering its oil concession. The other saw a chance to deliver a devastating blow against communism.

With this unanimous vote, the United States gave its final goahead for Operation Ajax, or Operation Boot, as the British continued to call it. The governments in London and Washington [the Eisenhower administration] were finally united in their enthusiasm. One looked forward to recovering its oil concession. The other saw a chance to deliver a devastating blow against communism.

Instead of negotiating seriously, they [the British] issued only “rash statements” and “impulsive expressions of resentment” about what they considered the theft of their property in Iran. “I frankly feel that if the British government does not cooperate,” he concluded, “it will make the success of my mission extremely doubtful if not impossible.”

'Germans found the conditions where “one could do as one pleased,” where they could kill Jews in large numbers for the first time, in 1941, as they invaded the Soviet Union. It was in the zone of double occupation, where Soviet rule preceded German, where the Soviet destruction of interwar states was followed by the German annihilation of Soviet institutions, that a Final Solution took shape.'

"At least half the effect of Hitler’s achievements during the years from 1933 to 1938 had been due precisely to the circumstance that they had been accomplished without war."

"Yeltsin was given a chance granted to very few. He was Russia’s overwhelmingly popular head of state at a pivotal moment in the country’s history after the fall of the Soviet Union and could have helped Russia to break once and for all with its totalitarian past. Unfortunately, he understood communism as an economic phenomenon and assumed that to produce democracy it was necessary only to change economic structures"

Many things changed after the fall of the Soviet Union. But as society was rapidly transformed, it became obvious that there had been no moral revolution in Russia. Communist society had taken it for granted that the individual was expendable; postcommunist Russia did as well, often to an even greater degree.

It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences. They do what all their comrades do. They have no choice. They have no time for thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night). Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everybody else does.

The more distant of two evils always seems the lesser. It may not be the lesser in reality.

Incidentally, it is typical of the early years of the Nazi regime that the whole façade of everyday life remained virtually unchanged. The cinemas, theaters, and cafés were full. Couples danced in the open air and in the dance halls. People strolled down the streets. The Nazis used this to great effect in their propaganda.

If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently. However, it made no difference at all. The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror intensified, the celebrations multiplied.

Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child’s understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

If the common coin of our shared morals comes into increasing question, with contested histories and myths being reduced to scraps of paper, we will have little to underpin our collective ethics except intuition – unless another shared experience, with luck one less terrible than the Second World War, provides renewed values against which our currency can be rebased.

It now seemed plain that cruelty, discrimination and murder were evil in a way that fornication, blasphemy and impiety were not.

The Renaissance had sown the notion that God’s law in our hearts could transcend Christianity: now it was flowering. The utopian visionary Gerrard Winstanley, a Seeker fellow-traveller, did recommend prayer – but added that to truly pray was ‘to pay the king of righteousness his due’, that is, to conduct yourself honestly, to ‘till the ground according to Reason’, and to recognise and root out evil within yourself.

In bold and restless pursuit of a greater purity, they were eager to leave behind the crass carnalities of a childish faith, just as the first Protestants had abandoned gross superstitions such as transubstantiation. This was not unbelief: it was belief raised to a new height.

The anxiety and intensity of Protestant piety made doubt a serious part of the religious ecosystem. The despair with which a great many Protestants sometimes wrestled could easily shade into doubt of various kinds, whether because God’s mercy seemed too good to be true, or because his justice seemed too terrible to contemplate.

The Calvinist theology which dominated post-Reformation England taught that all human beings were predestined by God either for Heaven or Hell before the creation of the world, in an unalterable decree. In most Calvinist countries, the anxieties this doctrine fomented were managed by a firm system of church discipline, which reassured those who conformed to it that they were likely to be among God’s elect.

As historians are now recognising, the early modern age endured a crisis of belief as well as of unbelief. Christians of all kinds were being asked, and were asking themselves, whether their ‘beliefs’ were wavering opinions, lazy assumptions, heartfelt convictions or true faith founded on rock.

If we search for certainty on any subject, he [Montaigne] warned, we will at length discover that ‘it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same men at different times’. No truth is ever definitively established. For example, he chose a lively current dispute: does the sun circle the earth, or vice versa?