George F. Kennan

“There were many facets of Soviet life that I respected and admired; but I could find little patience for the ideology itself. I saw it as a pseudoscience, replete with artificial heroes and villains; and as much as I admired the Soviet leaders for thewir courage, their determination, and their political seriousness, I could experience only disgust for other features of their political personality: their professed hatred and rejection of large portions of humanity, their abundant cruelties, their claims to infallibility, their opportunism and unscrupulousness of method, their disregard for truth, their conspiratorial secretiveness, and especially the love of power that so often and so obviously lurked behind the pretense of high-minded ideological conviction.”

This diatribe against Soviet ideology was penned by Kennan in his Memoirs, 1925-1950 (published in 1967).