ABSTRACT
Michael Servetus, who had challenged the legitimacy of persecuting heretics, had been put to death; and John Calvin, who had helped with the arrest and trial, objected only to the method. Sebastian Castellio, who had refused to dissimulate and broke with Calvin, was forced to support his wife and children as a common laborer. "To force conscience," Castellio explained, "is worse than cruelly to kill a man. For to deny one's convictions destroys the soul". Usually, in the West, people are confronted with the record of Maxim Gorky's famous trahison—how he returned from exile in Italy to become one of Stalin's abysmal "engineers of the soul". He took a high post and sang the song of Soviet success. In November 1957, in one of the decisive opening rounds of the Sino-Soviet conflict, a twelve-party declaration in Moscow designated "revisionism" as the "main danger" to world communism.
