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The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Book by Masha Gessen · 2 quotes · Totalitarianism, Fascism, Trumpism

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The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia Quotes

“Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: 'even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.' The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote [Yuri] Levada, in 'the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.”

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Book:The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
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“Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...”

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Book:The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
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