I did expect wild vilification of communism in your obituary of Boris Yeltsin (April 28, 2007), but you surpassed even my wildest expectations. “He survived,” you write bombastically, “the Soviet experiment that hoped to create a new man and to root out everything human and natural.” To begin with, this is sloppy writing, as experiments cannot hope. Only people can hope. More important, this is sloppy thinking. Execrable as it eventually turned out in a backward country, communism was not about rooting out everything human and natural. After all, even communists were people, too. The Soviet experiment does deserve severe criticism, for it should never return, but the communist ideas that underlined it were not inhuman. Far from it, as Marx’s vast opus testifies. Vilification of the kind you succumb to will gratify only those who are already convinced that everything they do is human and natural. Absolutely everything. It is good to remember that Dostoyevsky’s Satan was the one who pompously declared that nothing human was alien to him.