“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?”

From Conversations with Stalin (1961).