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Patriot: A Memoir

Book by Alexei Navalny · 2 quotes · Corruption, Modern History, Collapse Of Soviet Union

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Patriot: A Memoir Quotes

“All Soviet people loved to criticize the authorities, but were afraid of the all-powerful KGB (which, in army towns, was referred to as osobisty, "special agents"). The main worry was telephone tapping. It was clearly not credible that the KGB could have sufficient staff to eavesdrop on the conversations in every apartment. Nevertheless, when friends came to visit my father and, after a few vodkas in the kitchen, started berating the authorities, my mother would put the telephone under a cushion. It seemed odd, and when I asked why she was doing it, she brushed the question aside by saying there was no knowing what might get said and who might hear it. I found that extraordinary. Here were grown-ups talking about completely ordinary matters, like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o'clock in the morning. I could not see what there was to be afraid of. All schoolboys had been to the stores and had noticed the long queues, and knew that the most used word in the Soviet lexicon was "shortage." That meant there must be people not allowing you to say what was obviously true. Moreover, they were apparently employing other people to listen in to the phone in your home to the extent that we needed to use a cushion to protect ourselves. What an irony that my first memory of the use of that cushion dates to 1984.”

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“The Soviet Union was amazingly effective at producing propaganda and telling lies, but what was needed here was the ability to build houses in a hurry, and that it was something it could barely do and certainly couldn't do well.... The question most puzzling even to my ten-year-old self was why the authorities were lying like this when everybody around me knew the truth. What kind of pathetic attempt at deception was this? If you are going to lie, you should at least be expecting to benefit from it in some way. You claim to be sick and you don't have to go to school; that at least makes sense. But what was the point of these lies? Describing the way the Soviet Union worked, Vasily Shukshin, a Russian writer, memorably said, "Lies, lies, lies . . . Lies as redemption, lies as atonement for guilt, lies as a goal achieved, lies as a career, as prosperity, as medals, as an apartment . . . Lies! The whole of Russia was covered with lies, like a scab." An excellent description of the situation. If the Chernobyl disaster had never happened, I would probably have heard less talk of politics. It would certainly have been less personal, and my political views would have been slightly different. But things happened as they did, and many years later, when I was a grown man, I watched the newly appointed acting president of Russia, forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin, on television, far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country's new "energetic leader," I kept thinking, He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.”

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