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Soviet Russia Quotes

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Soviet Russia Quotes

“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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“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence.”

CommunismTotalitarianismPolice StateSoviet RussiaStalinism19731938Double ThinkSecurity StateArbitrary Arrest
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“Every act of resistance to the government required heroism quite out of proportion to the magnitude of the act. It was safer to keep dynamite during the rule of Alexander II than it was to shelter the orphan of an enemy of the people under Stalin. Nonetheless, how many such children were taken in and saved…”

ResistanceHeroismSoviet Russia1974Enemy Of The PeopleOur Muzzled Freedom
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else.”

CommunismTotalitarianismNazismSoviet Russia19411977
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
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“But just take the jurists' side for a moment: why, in fact, should a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view! It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the Interrogators, the prosecutor's staff, the internal guard in the prison, and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.”

CommunismTotalitarianismSoviet RussiaStalinism19411973Show Trial
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to make you stronger than the Interrogator and the whole trap? From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me." Confronted by such a prisoner, the Interrogation will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

TotalitarianismRenunciationPolice StateSoviet RussiaInterrogation1969Prison Industry
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.”

PropagandaTotalitarianismWwiiDouble StandardSoviet RussiaStalinismPolitical Prisoners19451973Double Think
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.”

EconomicsSocialismCommunismFree MarketSoviet Russia1974FootnoteBlack MarketRationing
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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“We’ve covered ourselves with everything we own, plus a snow blanket on top. It does provide warmth. The snow is everywhere - our pillows, our hair. You stick your head out, take a deal breath, slip under the covers again and breathe out. Feels warm. The snow on your hair melts, then turns to ice. A winter hat. Silence. Darkness... The only thing visible is the snow.”

Soviet UnionSoviet RussiaDiaryGulagLithuanian LiteratureLabour Camp
Book:Shadows on the Tundra
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“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they've forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven't asked for it. You probably fancy that there's no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that's dear to me and that I live by.”

WarReligionPoliticsAuthorityCommunismAuthoritarianismCaptivitySoviet Russia
Book:Doctor Zhivago
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“The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.”

ReligionCommunismSoviet Russia
Book:The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
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“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

RussiaWorld War IiSoviet UnionWorld War 2Soviet RussiaWorld War TwoIron Curtain
Book:The Sinews of Peace
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“I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet loyal friends, kind-hearted tutors. I was trained at the factory school by the old craftsman Goubanov, I was assisted by the engineer Aliev, who was the shift boss, in my transfer to the most important sector of operations – the tunnel. I was trained by the superb instructor Miroevskiy in the aeroclub, the secretary of the Ulyanovsk District Comsomol Committee gave me a hand at a very hard moment of my life, then there was Maria Borek from Leningrad, the Secretary of the Smolensk District Comsomol Committee, the Commissar of the Smolensk aeroclub…Was it really possible to count all those who had warmed my soul with their sympathy and human kindness and helped me to realize my dream!”

GratitudeWwiiSoviet RussiaSturmoviks
Book:Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45
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“In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves. You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.”

TerrorismRussiaSoviet UnionSoviet RussiaRevolutionariesYouth Leaders
Book:Warning to the West
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“[Father Dmitry] “lived through collectivization, the crushing of the 80 percent of Russians that were peasants. He served as a soldier in World War Two, when millions of peasants died defending the government that had crushed them. He spent eight years in the gulag, the network of labour camps created to break the spirit of anyone who still resisted. He rose again to speak out for his parishioners in the 1960’s and 1970’s, striving to help young Russians create a freer and fairer society.”

Soviet Russia
Book:The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
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“In spite of everything, all the POWs except for the Russians were receiving food parcels and medication from the International Red Cross. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from that organisation. Stalin said then: “There are no POWs of ours – there are traitors…”

WwiiSoviet RussiaJoseph StalinPows
Book:Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45
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“Of the 403,272 tank soldiers (including a small number of women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die. Even the most optimistic troops knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew—or those at least who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself—would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armored coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply “boiling up.” The tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable. “Have you burned yet?” was a question tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. “I’m sorry,” the young man replies. “I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.”

WarDeathTanksWorld War 2Soviet RussiaRed Army
Book:Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
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“Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems.”

ThinkingWorldBelieveStillsTwoWarProblemGovernmentThreeEvilRichModernDespairSolutionsRedRootsChinaSpreadRussiaWar Of The WorldsGermanyPlusSovietDaringDogmaDictatorshipSocialistNaziBrutalityMonstrousExperimentationTwo WorldsIdealisticNazi GermanyUnconventionalSoviet RussiaMoney Is The Root Of All Evil
Author:Ayn Rand
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“The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.”

WaySecretModernMoralityAnxietyIdealsRootsCurrentsTerrorNobleRussiaCommunismConsistentSovietDreadDisguiseAltruismLiteralEmbodimentIrrationalitySoviet Russia
Book:Philosophy: Who Needs It
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“I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination 'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful.”

IfsWorldYearsPersonsDoeHas BeensFactsLastsChallengesFiveSeeingSpeechBasesNotionDefeatInternationalBritishRussiaRationalMinistersThirtyFive YearsPrimeAggressiveSovietBentPrime MinisterConquestDominationMisunderstandingComprehensionUnsuccessfulSoviet RussiaWorld Domination
Author:Enoch Powell
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“When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.”

PeopleIdeasWholeWould BeWaterLossDyingColdTasksRussiaDevelopingPostsDiscussionSufficientJust OneSovietPreservationObjectionsSoviet RussiaCold WaterDevastating Loss
Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent 'rights' of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.”

IfsSelfMatterTodayNationsInterestRightsSacrificeDutySlaveRussiaGermanyPensSovietRulersDictatorshipNaziGangSelf InterestCubaSelf SacrificeOutlawNazi GermanySoviet Russia
Author:Ayn Rand
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“25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?”

PeopleCountryStatesFactsProblemUsedFoundMillionsImagineUnionsRussiaFormerBordersRepublicSovietSoviet UnionSoviet RussiaFederation
Author:Vladimir Putin
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