Nikita Roncalli - Hutton Gibson

political and social realities, solemnly affirmed and
apparently indestructible. Days in which these pages
yellowed by the years were written with a solid – if callow
– faith in the fairness and legitimacy and honesty of the
intent. Pages rather quite documental than literary, and thus
designated by the intent – or vain ambitions? – of the
author to a future which then seemed well beyond the
discernible horizon of a lifetime, yet with equally solid
uncertainty as to the if, how, and when, they would be
consigned to the printing press.
Indeed, these pages on which intermingle diary,
chronicle, and history mostly unknown to most, are blotted
by the original sin of a guilt, at that time deserving of the
most passionate blame: having dared, against every
opportunistic logic, to trace a “counter-life” of John XXIII
that would underscore the revolutionary commitment of
that Pope, which earned him the name of “Pope of the
communists.”
The sudden fall of Soviet communism has triggered a
centrifugal jumble within the muddled ranks that used to be
the party of the sickle and the hammer. No one has ever
soiled his hands with the Bolsheviks; no one has pocketed
ready rubles; no one, by George! has ever compromised
himself with Moscow. And in the meantime, as in a
Biblical scourge, from the half-closed archives of the
Kremlin are darting out, as deadly thunderbolts incinerating
the fake, irrefutable documents corroborating the closest –
and logical – cooperation of these individuals with the
Soviet “Mamuska” (mother).