“You have, I know, read Dostoevsky?”

Yugoslav communist Milovan Đilas' chilling account of confronting Stalin about the Red Army's mass rapes in Eastern Europe at the end of WWII.

“I explained to him that it had not been my intention to insult the Red Army, but I had wished to call attention to irregularities of certain of its members and to the political difficulties they were creating for us. Stalin interrupted: ‘Yes, you have, I know, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, his psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade - over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his amusing himself with a woman, after such horrors?”