20 I CHRONICLESnrized experience must fail to happen. Yet it is sometimesndifficult to create this failure because of circumstancesnoutside total Politburo control: street gossip, things heardnaccidentally over Radio Liberty or the BBC, conversationsnwith foreign visitors, or overseas travel. Still, the KGB takesncare of the street gossip, jamming may hinder the memoryrestoringnWestern broadcasts, conversations with foreignersnare discouraged, and travel everywhere is tightly controlled.nWhat may then happen is that the newly presentednmaterial does register but Homo sovieticus cannot retain itnfor more than a few minutes. Access to such memory isndenied because it no longer exists. What he has seen,nheard, or read contrary to The Single Lie simply disappears.nOnly the last and latest officially promulgated memory isntrue and becomes a will-o-the-wisp Single Truth. The resultnis a severe perceptual dislocation of space and time. This isnfollowed by an acceptance or creation of “false and fabricatednaccounts of recent events,” which coincide with thenmedical definition of confabulation, the concomitantnsymptom of Korsakoff’s psychosis, defined in Harrison’s asn”an amnesic confabulatory psychosis.”nKorsakoff’s psychosis is the behavior norm of Soviet mannexcept, perhaps, for a handful at the top of the nomenklatura.nWithout memory, there can be no fixed chain ofnevents, or causality, no criteria for examining humannbehavior, and no possible moral judgment. It becomesnimpossible and dangerous, even for members of the nomenklatura,nto form lasting moral judgments. For Homonsovieticus, everything is de novo.nPublic life in the USSR astonishingly resembles the set ofnpathological symptoms described medically as “confusionalnstates.” Medical authorities define “confusion” as a generalnterm “denoting an incapacity of the patient to think withncustomary speed and clarity … a derangement of thenintellectual function, i.e., an inability to learn, remember,ncalculate, reason abstractly, etc.” Amnesia is defined bynthem as “loss of the ability to form memories despite annalert state of mind. It presupposes an ability to grasp thenproblem, to use language normally and to maintain adequatenmotivation. The failure is mainly one of retention,nrecall, and reproduction.”n”Dementia,” on the other hand, is “loss of reason, ornmore particularly, a deterioration of all intellectual orncognitive functions, without clouding or disturbances ofnperception. Implied in the word is the idea of a gradualnenfeeblement of mental powers in a person who formerlynpossessed a normal mind.” The cure for the Soviet versionnof Korsakoff’s psychosis is often simple: exile or escape fromnthe USSR. In cases of emigres or defectors, total recallnis usually instantaneous. Korsakoff’s psychosis subsumesna memory “deranged out of all proportion to all otherncomponents of mentation and behavior.” It can create whatnis called “retrograde amnesia,” specifically, “an impairednability to recall events and other information that had beennrecorded in the mind before the onset of the disease.” It cannalso create “an impaired ability to acquire new information,ni.e., to learn or to form new memories.” This is calledn”anterograde amnesia.” The victim is said to be “lacking inninitiative and spontaneity.” (Anyone who has read V.I,nLenin’s canonical writings, especially What Is to Be Done?nknows how violently he warned against “spontaneity.”)nnnNow there are, from a democratic standpoint, certainndisadvantages when a Party-State prevents freedom of memory.nFor example, there can be no such intellectual disciplinenas history in the Soviet Union because it couldnendanger the legitimacy of The Single Lie system. Yegor K.nLigachev, No. 2 man in the Soviet hierarchy is reported bynthe New Yor^ Times (24 March 1987) as saying that Sovietnhistory “should not focus solely on mistakes and disappointments.”nYet, though various historians in nontotalitariannsocieties interpret the same events differently, they still allnagree that they happened. Such minimal agreement, letnalone differences of interpretation, is impossible amongnSoviet historians unless they are permitted to remember anspecific event or a specific personality. No Soviet historianncould—without permission—publicly remember the verynexistence of Leon Trotsky, let alone discuss his majorncontributions to the Russian Revolution. It is not thatnTrotsky is just another Soviet “un-person”—for Sovietnhistorians, V.I. Lenin is the only revolutionary historicalnpersonage they may safely remember. Stalin, on the othernhand, pops in and out of official Soviet historical consciousness,nlike his successors. (There is a quip in Soviet academicncircles that a Soviet historian is a man who can predict thenpast.)nUnder the Soviet Single Lie, there is nothing in thenSoviet annals and archives about Trotsky anyone maynremember or investigate because such files simply don’tnexist, except for those Soviet officials who decide when annew “memory” is to be created. Despite protestations andnactions of the American Political Science Association, therencan be no political science in the Soviet Union—after all,npolitical science from Aristotle to the present is intended tonquestion and empirically test findings, conclusions, theories,nand propositions regardless of the authority behindnthem. Such political science depends on freedom of memory,na state of affairs which cannot exist in a Party-Statenwhich has expropriated personal memory.nAlmost half a century ago, Soviet Marshal Tukhachevskynand seven Soviet generals were executed at Stalin’s command.nOn 13 June 1937, all Soviet newspapers published an”command to the Army” signed by Marshal Voroshilov,nthen war commissar, charging those executed with havingnbeen Nazi spies and conspirator-wreckers who had tried tonprovoke war against the USSR.nIn 1958, Tukhachevsky and some of the generals were, atnthe instigation of Nikita Khrushchev, given a posthumousnrehabilitation. (Six years later, in October 1964, Khrushchevnhimself was given the heave-ho and anathematized asna “harebrained schemer.”) So we have: from one memoryn— Stalin’s extermination of the Soviet General Staff—tonanother memory—the rehabilitation of some members ofnthe same staff—to a third memory: the rehabilitationnof Stalin himself Who knows what the fourth memorynwill be?nIn Khrushchev’s “secret” anti-Stalin speech of 1956,nStalin was described in language which might have put ton