`Like Big Friends from Home'

Chief among the traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from other species is not language or the opposable thumb but the ability to lie to ourselves. Rationalization, a capacity to sincerely believe the obscenely moronic, is a uniquely human quality. You’ll never meet a self-respecting chimpanzee who has taken membership in the Stalin Society, whose members deny the “Ukrainian famine-genocide myth” and Stalin’s show trials, and blame the Katyn Forest massacre on the Nazis. One of his 20 million, perhaps 30 million, victims, Osip Mandelstam, wrote of Stalin, in a translation by W.S. Merwin: “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries./He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.”