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As I lay awake on my plank bed, the most unorthodox thoughts passed through my mind—about how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance, and also how relative are all human systems and ideologies and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another.

This passage comes in Part One, Section 20, as Ginzburg lies on her plank bed at the Krasin Street prison. She has recently been transported from the hellish cellars at Black Lake and has just received a box of cigarettes in a package from her mother. Because she does not smoke, she offers them to a fellow inmate who is a Social Revolutionary. The woman thanks Ginzburg but then asks a fellow Social Revolutionary if she should accept cigarettes from a Communist. The answer she receives is “No,” and so she refuses Ginzburg’s offer. Later, as Ginzburg drifts off to sleep, she considers the steadfastness, even the stupidity, with which some people hold to their ideals. Her cellmate, a desperate cigarette smoker, will suffer through her withdrawal in order to avoid something as benign as taking cigarettes from an enemy. Ginzburg, however, has no qualms about offering a source of comfort to a fellow prisoner, even one whose political views she disagrees with. She sees no reason for the prisoners to erect artificial walls of prejudice when so many real walls already exist around them. Her cellmate’s “blinkered intolerance” is little more than bias, an unwillingness to separate a person’s compassion from his or her political ideologies.

When Ginzburg speaks of “the tortures which human beings inflict on one another,” she is speaking not just of the physical tortures visited upon the inmates by the interrogators or the prison guards. She is also speaking of the hurts and discriminations prisoners visit on fellow prisoners. People of varying cultures, backgrounds, ideologies, and religions fill the prisons, and Ginzburg accurately describes the multiplicity and relativity of belief systems. She makes clear that in addition to the diversity of ethnic backgrounds and languages being spoken, there is the attendant diversity of political ideologies. People do not separate themselves solely on the basis of cultural affiliations, religion, or ancestry but also on the basis of moral doctrines and ideologies. Yet as Ginzburg points out, at least one universal constant exists: the willingness of men and women from all walks of life to use those differences as justification for bullying others.

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