"Compared to the Russians, the Germans are light-hearted children, romantic and capricious where the Russians are rigorous and single-minded to a point of absurdity. ....[After the Revolution and its] brief flowering of national genius in disorganized abandon....the school-bell rang, and the refreshed school-children filed back into the classroom to find the ikon replaced by the red star, the benign picture of the Little Father, Nicholas II, by the portrait of V.I.Lenin, and the lessons started afresh with the same hermetic sealing against the intrusion of doubt. Everything had changed but the manner; yet the manner was all-important. Even the spirit of the confessional, of mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, was deflected from the ornate robe of the priest to the frostbitten ear of the Commissar...."