Quote by Alexei Navalny

“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.”

Quote by Alexei Navalny