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I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin. From close up, he was much taller than I expected. Our moral education teacher, Nora, had told us that imperialists and revisionists liked to emphasize how Stalin was a short man. He was, in fact, not as short as Louis XIV, whose height, she said, they–strangely–never brought up. In any case, she added gravely, focusing on appearances rather than what really mattered was a typical imperialist mistake. Stalin was a giant, and his deeds were far more relevant than his physique.
pg.95, “Yet when he tried to articulate all of this in a way that others might understand and relate to, when he tried to explain what it meant to achieve freedom away from the repressive machinery of the state and the exploitation of the market, he ran out of words. He knew what he was against but found it hard to defend what he stood for. Sentences, theories, ideals crowded in his head, and he struggled to find a way to order them, to explain his priorities and to share his views. Everything eventually exploded in thousands of fragments: what he knew, what he was, what he tried to be, what he wanted to see happen. Like the lives of the revolutionaries whose heroic deaths he admired, like his favourite revolution, the one that had never taken place.”