Any discussion with Alexandr was a challenge. He liked to make paradoxical statements, shocking to ordinary thinking with ideological clichés. It was hard to pin him down in common patterns, because he wasn't built according to such patterns. He was neither communist nor anti-communist, although he was considered both, but a scientist, a researcher. I have said it both in interviews and in his books. Alexander Zinoviev, like no other, had the courage to reveal the reality of communism, the absurdity and cruelty of a world that would have seemed utopian, unimaginable, if it had not been a reality. What Alexander Zinoviev reproached the Western world, although he considered it to be the most successful civilization in human history, was the fact, paradoxically in itself, that it is too efficient and produces too much.
