Just finished reading Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness at Noon", translated by Daphne Hardy, published 1941 by The Macmillan Company. It is about a fictional Russian revolutionary arrested, interrogated, put on trial and executed in Stalin's purges of the '30s. It's fascinating, and shed light on what was to me an unfathomable process.

At one point the adminstrative magistrate (interrogator) reads from the diary of the protagonist, Rubashov, who had written,

"It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right mush shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. For consumption by the masses, the politicial processes must be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair".

The old routines still play the best.

Arf