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Russian Revolution Quotes

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Russian Revolution Quotes

“It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.”

LifeArtBeautyHistoryRevolutionIndividualityRussiaSocialismCommunismRussian RevolutionDoctor Zhivago
Book:Doctor Zhivago
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“For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!”

WarLibertyRevolutionCivil WarDictatorshipSelf DeceptionHitlerRussian RevolutionStalinOrgoneEmotional PlagueLavalPetain
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am.”

LifeInspirationalSelfRussiaRoyaltyRussian RevolutionAnastasiaRomanovsOtmaTsar Nicholas
Book:The Lost Crown
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“Of the Russian exiles, Lenin is the last I should have picked as a man of destiny. [Angelica] Balabanoff says that she cannot remember where she first met Lenin and that even when she became conscious of his existence he made no impression upon her. Many others would say the same, but I remember vividly my first meeting with him. It was at dinner in a small Greek restaurant in Soho, not far from the house which bears the tablet commemorating the fact that Karl Marx once lived there. I met him again at Stuttgart, [at the International Socialist Congress] in 1907. In the meantime he had acquired the reputation of being a brilliant student of Marxian economics, a dangerous antagonist in all intra-party controversies and a master of revolutionary tactics and sectarian conspiracies. At the conference he was usually surrounded by a small group of whispering disciples. … Some of Lenin's enemies believed that he was a paid emissary of the Russian police. His tactics and the dissensions which he promoted among the Russian socialists aroused suspicion. He was a fanatic, a disorganizer, a sectarian, who gave no indication in pre-war days of having the qualities of a national leader. He won his battles but they were always directed against his comrades.”

DestinyLondonExileRussian RevolutionKarl MarxLeninFanaticSectarianVladimir LeninBolshevik
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Author:Sana Krasikov
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“My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbours, to doing her washing by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”

LoveAmericaFictionMotherhoodCommunismSoviet UnionBrooklynFiction NovelSoviet RussiaRussian LiteratureRussian RevolutionBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century Russia
Book:The Patriots
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“It is in connection with the deliberate effort of the skillful demagogue to weld together a closely coherent and homogeneous body of supporters that the third and perhaps most important negative element of selection enters. It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they," the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive program. The enemy, whether he be internal, like the "Jew" or the "kulak," or external, seems to be an indispensable requisite in the armory of a totalitarian leader. That in Germany it was the Jew who became the enemy until his place was taken by the "plutocracies" was no less a result of the anticapitalist resentment on which the whole movement was based than the selection of the kulak in Russia. In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism because a traditional dislike of large classes of the population for commercial pursuits had left these more readily accessible to a group that was practically excluded from the more highly esteemed occupations. It is the old story of the alien race's being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them. The fact that German anti-Semitism and anticapitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.”

ResentmentAuthoritarianismNazismAntisemitismDemagogueryRussian RevolutionCommon EnemyAnticapitalismTotalitarian Propaganda
Book:The Road to Serfdom
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“¡Obreros! Picad el miedo. Vuestra es la tierra desnuda. Saltad el hambre y la muerte por sobre la honda laguna, y uníos a los campesinos, y a los que en caña se anudan. ¡Rómpanse un millón de puños contra moral tan injusta! ¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos como se alzaron en Rusia! Workers! Slash the fear. Yours is the naked earth. Leap hunger and death over the deep lagoon, and join the peasants and those knotted to the cane. Break a million fists against so unjust a morality! Raise, raise your arms like they were raised in Russia! ("Desde el Puente Martín Peña")”

WorkersInjusticeRussiaWorking ClassRussian RevolutionPuerto Rican Poetry
Author:Julia de Burgos
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“Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanic of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process”

ProcessHistoryRevolutionOrganizationSociologyProletariatClass StruggleRussian Revolution
Book:The History of the Russian Revolution By Leon Trotsky - Volume Two
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“The law of combined development of backward countries – in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors – here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war – that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development – and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.”

Russian RevolutionHistorical MaterialismPermanent Revolution
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“This investigation has shown that many of the widespread interpretations about the Russian Revolution have either no basis in fact or, at best, are ideologically motivated exaggerations. We could find no evidence for example that there was anything in the DNA of Bolshevism that would lead it to consciously and deliberately undermine proletarian power from the start. On the contrary they did all they could to encourage it for the first 6 months. Such accusations of course are made by those who already know the story ended badly, but to leave out the positive achievements of those early months is a distortion which denies the achievements of the working class in Russia.”

SocialismCommunismSoviet RussiaBolsheviksRussian RevolutionOctober RevolutionLeft Communism
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.”

HistoryCommunismTortureSoviet UnionStalinismRussian RevolutionMass Murder1936GorkyLubyanka
Book:Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky
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“While making studies of the revolutionary movement, I was aided for a time by Angelica Balabanoff. This restless, diminutive Russian knew almost everyone engaged in socialist and communist activities. Aflame with the spirit of revolt, she spared no effort to infect others with her hatred for the capitalist regime. She was very useful as she not only brought me in contact with everyone I wished to meet, but she also spoke fluently many of the European languages. She would often sit beside me at conferences and in restaurants, translating into my ear, in a soft and to others almost inaudible voice, everything of interest said by the various speakers, no matter from what country they came. She was afterward one of Mussolini's chief aids and became his assistant editor when he took control of *Avanti*. In 1917 she went back to Russia with Lenin and other communists in the train so kindly provided by the German government, which expected them to augment the chaos already paralyzing its enemies on the East. Revolutionists talk fast and are often well educated. In some groups at dinner three or four languages would be spoken and, of course, at all the socialists and labor conferences delegates from many countries delivered their addresses in their native tongues. These different languages were laboriously translated by official interpreters. It was unnecessary to follow these dreary repetitions when Balabanoff sat beside me. She was often the official interpreter at the larger gatherings and her translations were never questioned — although she often excelled the orator in eloquence when he was expressing some of her cherished and more violently revolutionary views. Although she was a valued aid to both Mussolini and Lenin — I believe she brought them together at one time — and the most impassioned revolutionist I have ever met, she left Russia in 1921, ill and thoroughly disillusioned by the Reign of Terror.”

RevolutionCommunistFascismTranslationDisillusionRussian RevolutionLeninMussoliniAngelica BalabanoffBalabanoff
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“Wina za błędy bolszewików spada ostatecznie na międzynarodowy proletariat i przede wszystkim na bezprzykładną uporczywą nikczemność niemieckiej socjaldemokracji, partii, która za czasów pokoju udawała, że maszeruje na czele światowego proletariatu, miała czelność pouczać świat i próbowała go prowadzić, partii, która we własnym kraju liczyła przynajmniej 10 milionów zwolenników obu płci, a teraz oto od 4 lat niczym sprzedajny średniowieczny żołdak na rozkaz klas panujących 24 razy każdego dnia przybija socjalizm do krzyża.”

SocialismCommunismBolsheviksRussian RevolutionSocial DemocracyRóża Luksemburg
Book:O rewolucji
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“Tolstoy was not associated with any revolutionary group but his writings had a tremendous influence. A continuous stream of Utopians, rebels and cranks passed in and out of his doors. When I was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, I was shocked by the depth of his despondency, and after he had forecast, with a foresight given only to genius, the bloody upheavals to come, I left his presence deeply regretting that age, moral distress and spiritual loneliness rendered him incapable of looking joyfully forward to what many believed would be the birth of a great and enduring democratic Russian Republic.”

LiteratureDemocracyRevolutionUtopianMisfitsDisillusionRussian RevolutionRebelsTolstoyLeo Tolstoy
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“What is clearer is that suicide attacks, and our responses to them, have been central to the formation of the modern age. They helped create the conditions that caused the Russian Revolution; they were in the forefront of the minds of men who created a nuclear epoch and, unwittingly, the Cold War that followed; they were there at the beginning of the War on Terror that still dominates our headlines and they have helped drag the Middle East into the quagmire that it is today. In so doing, they have fuelled fears about migrants and refugees the world over, they have challenged the UN to its very core, and they have fed off conspiracy theories, post-truth propaganda and a view that the world is witnessing a millenarian clash of civilliations that heralds the end of days.”

TerrorismRussian RevolutionSuicide BombersSuicide Bombing
Book:The Price of Paradise
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“The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood. It was perhaps unavoidable, given the Volunteers' desperate need for food and the reluctance of the peasants to give it to them. The Whites were stranded in a Red peasant sea. But there was also an element of sheer class war and revenge in their violence, as in so many acts of the White Terror, which was a mirror image of the class resentment and hatred that drove the Red Terror. Terror lay at the heart of both regimes.”

Russian RevolutionWhite TerrorRed Terror
Book:A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 - 1924
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“Prior to January 22, 1905, the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small handful of people, and the reformists of those days, derisively called us a 'sect'. Within a few months, however, the picture completely changed. The hundreds of revolutionary Social Democrats 'suddenly' grew into thousands; the thousands became leaders of between two and three million proletarians.”

BolsheviksRussian RevolutionVladimir LeninSocial Democrats
Author:Vladimir Lenin
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“Rewolucja rosyjska znajduje się zatem między Scyllą a Charybdą. Jeżeli zechce wyrwać się z pętli ludobójstwa zawierając odrębny pokój, zdradzi międzynarodowy proletariat i swój własny los na rzecz imperializmu niemieckiego. Jeżeli natomiast nie będzie mogła sama doprowadzić do powszechnego pokoju, pozostanie jej tylko do wyboru albo aktywne prowadzenie wojny, a wtedy będzie działała na rzecz imperializmu Ententy, albo bierny udział w wojnie, tzn. zachowanie pod względem wojskowym bezczynności, czym równie niewątpliwie poprze interesy imperializmu niemieckiego. Takie jest prawdziwe położenie republiki rosyjskiej – położenie tragiczne, którego w najmniejszym stopniu nie może zmieniać piękna formuła pokojowa, powitana przez wszystkich jako zbawienne, magiczne słowo.”

BolsheviksWwiRussian RevolutionRóża Luksemburg
Book:O rewolucji
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“Wszystko to, co dzieje się w Rosji, jest zrozumiałe i stanowi nieunikniony łańcuch przyczyn i skutków, których punktem wyjścia i zwornikami są: niedopisanie niemieckiego proletariatu i okupacja Rosji przez imperializm niemiecki. To znaczy, że żądano by od Lenina i towarzyszy czynów nadludzkich, gdyby spodziewano się po nich wyczarowania w takich okolicznościach najpiękniejszej demokracji, wzorcowej dyktatury proletariatu i kwitnącej gospodarki socjalistycznej. Oni i tak dzięki zdecydowanie rewolucyjnej postawie, przykładowej energii i niezłomnej wierności międzynarodowemu socjalizmowi naprawdę dokonali tego, czego w tak diabelnie trudnych warunkach można było dokonać. Niebezpieczeństwo zaczyna się wtedy, gdy robią oni cnotę z konieczności, gdy swoją taktykę, wymuszoną przez te fatalne warunki, petryfikują teoretycznie we wszystkich punktach i starają się narzucić je międzynarodowemu proletariatowi jako wzorzec socjalistycznej taktyki, który należy naśladować. W ten sposób, całkiem niepotrzebnie szkodząc sobie samym i skrywając swą rzeczywistą, niezaprzeczalną zasługę dziejową pod korcem wymuszonych potknięć, oddają niedźwiedzią przysługę międzynarodowemu socjalizmowi, o który i dla którego walczyli i cierpieli, ponieważ chcą wnieść do jego zasobów jako nowe poznanie wszystkie te narzucone w Rosji przez konieczność i przymus opaczności, które koniec końców były przecież tylko odblaskami bankructwa międzynarodowego socjalizmu w tej wojnie światowej.”

CommunismBolsheviksRussian RevolutionRóża Luksemburg
Book:The Russian Revolution
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“Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt in March 1921 marked a point of no return. There was no longer even a whiff of pretense that the Communist government had the support of the people over whom it ruled. The Red Terror had been aimed at "class enemies"; the Civil War was a struggle against "imperialists and White Guards." Even the peasant wars had pitted, in theory at least, proletarians against "capitalist farmers." But now the world's first "proletarian" government had begun slaughtering urban proletarians, too. It is no wonder that "Kronstadt" became, in addition to a black mark on Trotsky's record, a byword of Bolshevik betrayal for European socialists who refused to bow to Moscow.”

Russian RevolutionTrotskyKronstadt
Book:The Russian Revolution: A New History
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“Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops. 'Will you,' the asked, 'promise to divide the estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?' 'Only over my dead body,' responded Kaledin. A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains. And the Cossack movement was no more...”

RussiaUssrRussian RevolutionLeninTrotskyCossackKaledin
Book:Ten Days That Shook the World
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“My Russia My Responsibility (The Sonnet) Moya Rossiya, moya lyubov, I am sorry, That the world has turned its back on us. But can you really blame them when, We accepted a terrorist as a leader of ours! Awake, arise, my brave comrades, Drink deep from the valor of Volga. I say, enough with apathy, for it is high time, To sanitize our land against all domestic virus. We let a terrorist loose on our neighbors, And all that bloodshed is on our hands. Even now if we don't mend our horrific error, One savage will turn our world into a wasteland. Mnogo te obicham, for you are still my home. To humanize our home is the duty of none but our own.”

War And PeaceRussian RevolutionRussian PoetryRussian ImperialismRussian Civil WarRussia And Ukraine ConflictRussian Civil SocietyRussian Human Rights ActivistRussian CivilRussian Politics
Book:Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting
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