Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.COMMUNISTS: New Crime, Old Origin
To the strange lexicon of Communist crimes, Moscow last week added a new one with a classic heritage: Pythagorism. The original culprit: Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher-mathematician (circa 582-507 B.C.) known to schoolboys as the geometric genius who first pinned down the proposition that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
But Pythagoras also dabbled in metempsychosis—the belief that dead men's souls migrate to other living bodies in an endless process of reincarnation. This was a notion that Moscow's...
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