Soviet Quotes

“They came for him near midnight, seven hard-faced men arriving simultaneously in a matching set of Zis 101s, the black-lacquered saloon car so shamelessly modeled on the American Buick Roadmaster, and so capriciously favored by the sinister flying squads of the NKVD.
Ironically, the arrest when it came did not shock Batya. He had prepared for it.”
― KGE Konkel, Who Has Buried the Dead?: From Stalin to Putin… The last great secret of World War Two

“An army of the people is invincible!”
― Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

“[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. [...] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”
― Yuri Bezmenov

“[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Here in the Settlement of the Pale, life was hard, but in times of real trouble, Leah thought it was always worse for the Jews.”
― Beverly Magid, Sown in Tears: A Historical Novel of Love and Struggle

“Her whole face lights up when she smiles, Vaselik thought. She’s almost beautiful. When Leah entered the office and saw Vaselik standing there, her heart sklipped a beat like any foolish adolescent girl. Still he was her enemy...”
― Beverly Magid, Sown in Tears: A Historical Novel of Love and Struggle

“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Кубло бандитів, кагебістів,
злодіїв та ґвалтівників
у стольному засіли місті
як партія більшовиків.”
― Василь Стус

“Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!”
― Sana Krasikov

“Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air”
― Sana Krasikov

“The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk”
― Sana Krasikov

“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

“A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own. attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.”
― Joseph Stalin, Collected Works. Volume 5

“Lenin did not write as eloquently about religion as Marx, nor did he write about it often. He wielded Marx's 'opium of the people' from time to time, but his own metaphor was alcoholic. In his 1905 essay, 'Socialism and Religion,' he wrote of 'the distribution of state-clerical gin' in which 'slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life.' His alternative metaphor suggests a shift from thinking of religion as anesthesia to thinking of it—much as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov did—as a vice.”
― roland elliott brown, Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda

“Candies Available for Civilian Consumption: Masha and Bear / Bear in the North / Little Bear / Clumsy Bear / Stratosphere / Strike! / Brighter! / Little Squirrel / Thumbelina / Moscow in Evening / Kiev in Evening / Fantastic Bird / Little Lemon / Little Lenin / Snowflake / Jelly / Fuzzy / Iris / Fudgy Cow / Little Red Hat / Alyonka / Little Miracle / Solidarity / Leningrad / Bird’s Milk / Red Poppy / Mask / Meteorite / Vizit / Red Moscow / Dream / Caramel Crab Necks / Goose Feet / Duck Beaks / Kiss Kiss / Golden Key / Snow / Crazy Bee…And So Many More!”
― Maria Reva, Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

“За красивими і наскрізь скомпроментованими словами про чистоту, любов і дружбу ховається ніщо, ховається брутальність, казенщина і гидь. Так постає нігілізм совєтської молоді. Думати одне, а говорити друге. Говорити одне, а робити друге. Навіть на еміґрації нас іноді вражає, як схильні брехати люди совєтського виховання. Часто навіть без потреби й мети.”
― George Y. Shevelov, З історії незакінченої війни

“Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?”
― 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

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

“A veces oigo una música... O una canción... Una voz de mujer... Y allí encuentro lo que he sentido. Algo semejante... En cambio, veo una película de guerra y sabe a mentira, leo un libro y lo mismo, mentira. No es... No es correcto. Comienzo a hablar y tampoco me sale. No es tan espantoso, ni tan bonito. ¿Sabe lo preciosos que resultan los amaneceres en la guerra? Antes de un combate... Los observas y estás segura: ese podría ser el último. La tierra es tan bella... Y el aire... Y el sol...”
― Svetlana Alexievich

“Here I wake up because the pregnant woman is touching my face with her fingers.
"Pane," * she says to me, "you're calling out in your sleep and tossing about. I'll arrange a bed for you in another corner because you're pushing my father."
She raises her thin legs and rounded abdomen and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. Lying on his back is an old man, dead. His glottis has been torn out and his face split in two; his beard is clotted with blue blood resembling a piece of lead.
"Pane," says the Jewess, shaking the mattress, "the Poles killed him, and he begged them: 'Kill me in the back yard so that my daughter doesn't see how I die.' But they did as it was most convenient to them. He died in this room, thinking of me. And now I'd like to know," cried the woman with sudden terrible violence, "I'd like to know where you'd find in the whole world another father like my father!”
― Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry

“I left the door open for Aliyev. I thought, he won't let Russia back in. Remember, Soviet Russia had crushed him and thrown him out.”
― Ebulfez Elchibey

“There was no such thing as Kazakhstan. It was just a chunk of Soviet Union.
I had to build a country, to establish an army, our own police, our internal life, everything from roads to the constitution. I had to change the minds of the people 180 degrees, from totalitarian regime to freedom, from state property to private property.
Nobody wanted to understand that. My comrades from the communist party were against me. I had to train myself too...
I wasn't raised with democracy and freedom of speech.”
― Nursultan Nazarbayev

“The essence of my happiness is fighting for the happiness of others. It’s strange, why is it that in grammar, the word" happiness” can only be singular? That is counter to its meaning, after all.… If it turns necessary to die for the common happiness, then I’m braced to.”
― Roza Georgiyevna Shanina

“We had a motherland, and now it's gone. What am I? My mother's Ukrainian, my father's Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We're all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says 'Russian', but we're not Russian. We're Soviet! But that country- where I was born- no longer exists.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“For the rest of the day, Daniil pretended to work while the combine pretended to pay him.”
― Maria Reva, Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

“The internat had taught her well: as soon as you want something, you lack it; and if you do get it, it can easily be taken away. But this lesson came at a cost—a dry unfeeling clump had formed in her chest, had grown with age. She wonders now: If she slit her skin open, would nothing but sawdust spill out?”
― Maria Reva, Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

“Soviet leaders wanted hearts and minds as much as mmoney and property. To get heart and minds, they needed to get at rituals; and they did. From the Revolution's earliest days, redesigning citizens' ritual lives was a key part of the reformist movement.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources