Every so often I receive a letter that is really an indictment dressed up as a question. The symbols a free Russia might one day claim, the writer says, are compromised goods. One of them helped build the hydrogen bomb. Another was tainted by ugly prejudice. So what kind of freedom is it, the writer concludes, that produces such soiled emblems? Behind the sneer there is a genuine and serious problem, and it deserves a serious answer. The problem is this: we want our heroes clean. We want the people who fought tyranny to have been free of every stain, and when we discover they weren’t, we feel cheated, and the cheated feeling slides quickly into contempt. I think this demand for purity is one of the most corrosive habits of the moral imagination, and I want to explain why.
No One Arrives From Mars
Symbols of any era do not fall from the sky. They do not arrive from another planet, fully formed and spotless. They grow from the soil of their own country — from its history, from the very muck in which they were rooted. There is simply no other place for them to come from. The men who built American democracy and wrote its founding documents about the equality of all men were, many of them, slaveholders. That is a grotesque contradiction, and it is also a fact, and the democracy they built is real all the same. The people who tried to fight Soviet totalitarianism were themselves Soviet people. Where else would they have come from? There was no reservoir of pre-purified citizens kept somewhere in cold storage, untouched by the system, waiting to step forward at the appointed hour. The dissident, the human-rights campaigner, the reformer — each was shaped by the same machinery that produced the informer and the apparatchik. Some managed, with great pain and never completely, to tear themselves free of it. Others stayed half-stuck. None emerged immaculate.
Consider the physicist who became, in his later life, one of the great moral voices of the twentieth century — a defender of human rights and a campaigner for peace — and who was also, earlier, one of the fathers of his country’s thermonuclear weapon. You can put the word “peacemaker” in scornful quotation marks if you like. But the contradiction is not a refutation of the man; it is the shape of an actual human life lived inside an actual totalitarian state. Or take the writer who did more than almost anyone to expose the machinery of the labor camps to the world, and who was also a Russian nationalist, an imperialist, a man whose later writings carried an open and shocking antisemitism, who warmed to the new autocrat after spurning the chaotic democrat who preceded him. I have my own sharp criticisms of him, and I do not retract them. But to reduce him to a flunky is absurd. His role in the indictment of Stalinism is undeniable. Both of these men grew out of Soviet soil. There were no other examples on offer.
This is not a peculiarity of Russia. The greatest liberator of a colonized people in the twentieth century — the man who taught a subcontinent how to resist an empire without picking up a gun — was a product of his own social context, with all its assumptions and blind spots, and at one point he even tried, naively and disastrously, to appeal to Hitler’s better nature. Everyone carries their birthmarks. There is no figure we rightly admire who is free of them, because history is not made by angels. It is moved forward by flawed, contradictory, often unpleasant human beings who nonetheless, at some decisive moment, pushed in the right direction.
Direction, Not Distillation
That phrase — the right direction — is the whole heart of the matter, and I want to state it as plainly as I can. The question to ask about a public figure is not “Is this person pure?” The answer to that is always no, and the question is therefore useless. The question is: which way did this person lead their country, their society, their fellow human beings? Toward more freedom or less? Toward the opening of the camps or their construction? A symbol is legitimate not because it is spotless but because of the vector of its life — the direction in which it pushed. By that measure, a man who helped build a terrible weapon and then spent his remaining years pushing his society toward liberty and disarmament is a symbol of freedom, his birthmarks and all. The bomb does not cancel the direction, and the direction does not absolve the bomb. Both are simply true at once, because people are contradictory.
Here a second confusion needs clearing away, one that runs in the opposite direction. People often assume that outstanding achievement in one field somehow validates a person’s convictions in another — as though brilliance were transferable, as though a great mind could not be wrong about the most important things. It can. There are Nobel laureates who were committed communists to the end of their lives. Does the fact that a man was a physicist of the first rank, decorated for his discoveries, oblige us to embrace his politics? Of course not. One of the most important philosophers of the last century was, flatly and without euphemism, a Nazi. Should we, out of respect for his thought, take up his allegiances? The proposition states itself absurdly. There are gifted people who are addicts; we do not therefore conclude that addiction is a virtue. Genius and folly, talent and monstrous belief, coexist in the same skull all the time. Achievement neither sanctifies a person’s worldview nor, conversely, does a bad worldview erase the achievement. These are separate axes, and the constant attempt to collapse them into one — to make the great man good or the bad man talentless — is a failure of basic clarity.
The Counterfeit of Contradiction
But I have to draw a sharp line here, because the principle that “people are contradictory” is easily abused. It gets stretched into a universal solvent that dissolves all moral judgment, and it is most often stretched to cover the worst people who ever lived. I am sometimes asked, in a tone of provocative open-mindedness, whether the architect of the Third Reich was not, after all, a “contradictory” personality — a veteran, a lover of dogs, a man who built roads and reduced unemployment, who even daubed a few amateur watercolors. The implication is that all this complexity should soften our verdict, or at least complicate it. It should not. The man presided over a regime responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The fact that the same hands which signed the orders were washed before dinner is not a contradiction. The fact that a mass murderer was fond of his dog is not a contradiction. These are not the tensions of a complex soul; they are the ordinary domestic furnishings of an entirely coherent evil. He was not a contradictory personality at all. He was a remarkably consistent one — complete, integrated, and entirely dark. To call such a figure “contradictory” is to grant him a depth and a humanity he forfeited absolutely, and it is precisely the kind of intellectual generosity that should be refused.
So the rule cuts both ways. The flaws of a man whose life pointed toward freedom do not cancel his direction. And the incidental human softnesses of a man whose life was an engine of murder do not buy him a single gram of redemption. The difference between the two is not the presence or absence of contradiction — it is the direction of the whole.
On Sides, and the Logic of Sparks
This same way of thinking lets us hold a difficult historical judgment without flinching, and I will state it directly: in the Second World War, the Soviet Union was on the side of good. I can already hear the objection, because I hear it constantly — what about the secret training of German pilots, the carve-up of Poland, the aggressive wars of the late 1930s, and above all the unfreedom that the Red Army carried into every country it “liberated”? Every item on that list is true. And yet the Soviet state was on the side of good at the moment it drew in and destroyed roughly two-thirds of the German divisions. The annihilation of that war machine was an act of good, whatever the motives behind it. The soldiers who opened the gates of Auschwitz were, for the people inside those gates, unambiguously the good — and no amount of rhetorical gymnastics about what those same soldiers’ state did before and after can touch that fact. From the collision of two evils, sparks of good can fly. The error — and it is a logical error, not merely a moral one — is to smear the crimes that came later backward across the wartime role, or to use the undeniable horrors of the regime to deny the undeniable good of crushing the fascist armies. You are conflating time periods. The state that did the great work of destroying those divisions went on, afterward, to commit fresh wrongs. But that is another chapter. Trying to abolish the contradictions of the world by collapsing them into a single clean verdict always produces a falsehood.
There is a related question about talent that fits the same frame. We have all watched gifted people throw in their lot with a vile regime and seem, afterward, to lose the very thing that made them worth watching. A novelist who wrote with real power dwindles into flatness once he takes the regime’s side; a musician whose songs were sharp and alive goes dull. Where does the talent go? The tempting answer is that genius and villainy are simply incompatible, that the muse flees the wicked. It is a beautiful idea, and it is false. The propagandist filmmaker of the Nazi regime did not lose her talent in its service; neither did the great Soviet director who put his genius at the disposal of the revolution. They served evil and remained brilliant. The difference is belief. To serve evil without losing your gift, you must genuinely believe in it — you must not experience it as evil at all. Those filmmakers believed; the cause, however monstrous, was seductive to them, carried a real and capturing idea. What kills talent is not evil as such but cynicism — selling yourself for money to a cause you don’t believe in and cannot find beautiful. The contemporary autocracies that have no compelling idea, only cash, buy their artists the way they buy any other commodity, and those artists’ work dies because there is nothing inside it but the transaction.
Why Purity Is a Prison
All of this leads to the demand that worries me most, because it wears the mask of integrity. It is the demand for total purity: the insistence that a decent person must refuse all contact with anyone tainted, must never share a platform, never sit at the same table, never appear on the same channel as someone deemed compromised. I want to say clearly where this logic comes from, because naming it dissolves most of its force. By the principle of six degrees of separation, any two people on the planet are linked through a startlingly short chain of acquaintance — I know someone who knows someone who knows someone, and within a handful of steps I am connected to literally anyone, including the worst people alive. If guilt is transitive — if your friend’s friend’s allegiance contaminates you — then everyone is contaminated, and the standard devours the whole human race, beginning with the person applying it.
Where have we seen this idea before, that mere contact transmits guilt? In two places, and they are not flattering company. The first is the code of the criminal underworld, where anyone who so much as touches a person of the lowest caste is himself made untouchable, cast down forever. The second is the logic of Stalinist repression, where being the daughter or son of an “enemy of the people” made you, too, an enemy of the people, where proximity was proof and association was crime. This cult of distilled, righteous purity — interacting only with the perfectly clean — is the morality of the prison yard and the show trial. It has nothing to do with virtue. And it has a predictable destination: total isolation, an ideological solitude in which you finally recognize only yourself as pure and see emptiness in every direction. A person can criticize the compromises of the milieu around them — I do — while still refusing the poisonous conclusion that contact equals complicity.
So I return the indictment, gently, to those who write me those letters. The people who built free institutions were not free of the world that made them. The symbols of liberty carry the birthmarks of the tyrannies they fought. Demanding that they be otherwise is not high principle; it is a refusal to understand how human beings and human history actually work. Judge people by the direction they pushed — toward the light or away from it — and hold the worst to account without inventing false contradictions to soften them. But abandon the fantasy of purity. It cannot be met by anyone who has ever lived, and the search for it ends, every single time, in either cynicism or cruelty.