Soviet Union Quotes

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.

Elena Gorokhova

The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.

Catherynne M. Valente

Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.

Christopher Hitchens

After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say “Russia!” to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, “How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

Michio Kaku

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.

David Remnick

Whenever the communists are under fire, it [the term "red-baiter"] has served to divert attention from the subject matter to futile discussion of personal motives, the critic’s private life and other deliberate tricks of befuddlement.

Eugene Lyons

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

Geoffrey Hosking

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was acontribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

Robert Conquest

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.P. 41

Timothy Snyder

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.

Christopher Hitchens

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world’s greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t.***An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous.Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin.***Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.

Freda Utley

Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human freedoms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.

Freda Utley

Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror.

Freda Utley

In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

Anthony Marra

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 "terrorists acts" aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders.

Lynne Viola

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more "advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.

Hannah Arendt

You have theoreticians who say, "The U.S. must stop the process of nuclear armament. We have enough already. Today America has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other half of the world. Why should we need more than that?" Let the American nuclear specialists reason this way if they want, but for some reason the nuclear specialists of the Soviet Union—and the leaders of the Soviet Union—think differently.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.

Svetlana Alexievich

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...

Masha Gessen

Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga...

Svetlana Alexievich

He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you.""Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.

Anthony Horowitz

Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.

Viktor Suvorov

Mounting tensions in Eastern Europe send shivers down the spine. Barely a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War we seem to be sliding inexorably towards another.

Alex Morritt

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

George F. Kennan

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth

Isaac Babel

I remember the teacher telling us that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, alongside Russia. “The Soviet Union is the largest and most glorious empire that the world has ever seen,” the teacher lectured. “We’re all proud comrades. We’re all like brothers. We’re so lucky to be part of the greatest nation that has ever existed. We love our country and our country loves us like a mother loves her children.

Carlito Sofer

In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

Kalle Lasn

LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.

A.E. Samaan

And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lenin held that religion was a simply product of social oppression and economic exploitation. 'The social oppression of toiling masses, their apparent complete helplessness before the blind forces of capitalism ... that is the deepest contemporary root of religion'. Theoretically it followed from this that the elimination of social and economic evils should lead to the disappearance of religious belief. In practice, however, the party has never shown any confidence that this would happen: it has not felt able to concede the churches toleration, and let them decline of their own accord. On the contrary, from the beginning it has aimed at the destruction of the churches and the forcible secularization of believers. With the exemption of the years 1941-53, that has remained the case ever since.

Geoffrey Hosking

...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.

Arthur Koestler

I've played Romeo for Juliet(But in depth)It's vignettes of silhouettes(And then read)And watched Russian roulette, yeah red SovietYet doing it simultaneouslyWhile dropping down shed oubliettesTurned around and took truth to the head thatLove is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death

Criss Jami

For nearly thirty years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.

Isaac Deutscher

Jesus to Pilate:"The trouble is," the bound man went on, not stopping by anyone, "that you are too closed off and have definitely lost faith in people. You must agree, one can't place all one's affection in a dog. Your life is impoverished, Hegemon.

Mikhail Bulgakov

An imaginary friend once asked me why Americans can't stand Russia. The answer was cold, deadly, silent, and, well expected. It’s because in Soviet Russia nothing happens anymore, because it doesn’t exist anymore. And Americans are all about happenings. If there isn’t one – they don’t go where it isn’t, because there isn’t anything to happen to them there.

Will Advise

Writers are engineers of human souls.

Yury Olesha

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ

Christopher Hitchens

It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Sana Krasikov

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

Sana Krasikov

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

Sana Krasikov

Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.

Orlando Figes

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

Sana Krasikov

Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant

Victor Sebestyen

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

Boris Pasternak

Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like "popular front," at other times "dialogue with Christianity." For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. 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

Sana Krasikov

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

Sana Krasikov

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

Sana Krasikov

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

Sana Krasikov

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

Sana Krasikov

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

Sana Krasikov

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

Sana Krasikov

A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism

Sana Krasikov

She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting

Sana Krasikov

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Soviet Union Quotes

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