" To insiders, it was a “scientific” worldview that enabled its possessors to rid themselves and others of all kinds of prejudice and superstition—and incidentally master an aggressive debating style characterized by generous use of sarcasm about the motives and putative “class essence” of opponents. "

― Sheila Fitzpatrick , Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s