Ussr Quotes

“My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

“I offered them Utopia, but they fought for the right to live in Hell.”
― Mark Millar, Superman: Red Son

“It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'

All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:

There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!

Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Truth and justice are commonly found in the personality of the paranoid delusional”
― Russian, Unknown

“Revolutionary Marxism sees in fascism a militant self-defense movement for the structure and interests of the capitalist system, directing the movements of the petit-bourgeois masses with pseudo-ideologies formed for the purpose of its own preservation.”
― Karl Otto Paetel, The National Bolshevist Manifesto

“...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.”
― Michael Parenti

“The danger now is that anti-intellectualism [...] is spreading all over the areas of so-called "Western civilisation". It can take many forms, from aggressive clericalism and atom-bomb militarism to the mild but dangerous pessimisms of Kierkegaard and Satre. All these forms have something in common. They all express the belief that man's state cannot be improved by conscious intelligent co-operation. They want less knowledge and more faith and are unanimous in attacking countries where men are trying to build up a scientific civilisation through their own efforts, and in belittling the beliefs which are leading them to do so - the philosophic system of dialectical materialism.”
― J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science

“The Ogre does what Ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man.
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.”
― W.H. Auden

“The final giveaway is the presence of ordinary criminal types within the leadership of the Communist Party and its revolutionary cadre. Here we find the sadists, the robbers, the killers, and the misfits. Revolution is alluring to them, because it gives them permission to do their thing under cover of an ideal. As Sam Vaknin has pointed out, “The suppression of envy is at the core of the narcissist’s being. If he fails to convince his self that he is the only good object in the universe, he is bound to be exposed to his own murderous envy. If there are others out there who are better than him, he envies them, he lashes out at them ferociously, uncontrollably, madly, hatefully, he tries to eliminate them.
J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R. Nyquist

“Международная программа Россіи и международная программа Совѣтовъ прямо противоположны. И потому патріотически солидаризоваться съ одержимыми коммунистами — безумно и безотвѣтственно. Всѣ ихъ планы, затѣи и войны ничего Россіи не принесутъ, кромѣ крови, муки, вымиранія, униженій, разоренія, всеобщей ненависти и всеобщей мести. Они не только не возвеличатъ и не обогатятъ Россію, но могутъ привести къ ея раздѣленію и распаденію, къ утратѣ ею ея исконныхъ, исторически и государственно безспорныхъ вотчинъ.”
― Иван Ильин, Советский Союз - не Россия

“I wasn’t thinking of the Viet Nam War but war in general; in particular, how a war forces you to become like your enemy. Hitler had once said that the true victory of the Nazis would be to force its enemies, the United States in particular, to become like the Third Reich—i.e. a totalitarian society—in order to win. Hitler, then, expected to win even in losing. As I watched the American military‐industrial complex grow after World War Two I kept remembering Hitler’s analysis, and I kept thinking how right the son of a bitch was. We had beaten Germany, but both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were getting more and more like the Nazis with their huge police systems every day. Well, it seemed to me there was a little wry humor in this (but not much). […] Look what we had to become in Viet Nam just to lose, let alone to win; can you imagine what we’d have had to become to win? Hitler would have gotten a lot of laughs out of it, and the laughs would have been on us … and to a very great extent in fact were. And they were hollow and grim laughs, without humor of any kind.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick: 5 Vols.

“In general, forced migration study reveals the stunning and gradually increasing adherence of the Soviet system to ethnically rather than socially determined repression criteria (the policy in question reached its apogee during Stalin’s rule). In other words, the state declares its loyalty to international and class awareness publicly, while in practice gravitates towards essentially nationalistic goals and methods.
The deportation of so-called punished peoples can provide a most prominent example of this approach, the deportation itself serving as the punishment. All such peoples were deported not merely from their historical homeland, but also from other cities and districts, as well as demobilized from the army, which shows that such ethnic deportations embraced the entire country (we term this type of repression “total deportation”). Apart from their homeland, the “punished people” were deprived of their autonomy if they had any before, in other words, of their relative sovereignty.

In essence, ten peoples in the USSR were subjected to total deportation. Seven of them—Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingushetians, Chechens, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars—lost their national autonomy too (their total number amounted to 2 million, and the land populated by them before the deportation exceeded 150,000 square kilometers). According to the criteria formulated above, another three peoples—namely Finns, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks—fall under the category of “totally deported peoples.”
― Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR

“He knew that he had been born in a sick country, a country now intent on spreading its disease to others through the social media channels and under the cover of night--its true gift of the moment.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends

“Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.”
― Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History

“Without an intellectual and emotional shift among both the American public and policymakers, the Unite States will not be in a good position to promote American values... and gain access to what is surely the largest new market and source of raw materials to open to the West in this generation"

Goble, Paul A. "Forget the Soviet Union." Foregn Policy 86 (1992): 56”
― Goble, Paul

“bourgeois scientists found it necessary to invent the intraspecific struggle. They say that a fierce struggle for food, of which there is an insufficiency, goes on in nature, within the species, among its individual members – a struggle for the conditions of life. The stronger, fitter individuals win. The same thing, they aver, goes on among human beings: the capitalists, you see, are brainier, are more capable by nature and heredity. We Soviet people know full well that the oppression of the working people, the domination of the capitalist class and imperialist war have nothing in common with the laws of biology. These phenomena are all governed by the laws of decaying bourgeois, capitalist society, which has outlived its day. Nor is there any intraspecific competition in nature itself.”
― Trofim Lysenko, Agro Biology

“What they didn't understand was that the Soviet Union wasn't communism, certainly not as Marx envisioned it. Instead, it was best understood as the most extractive sort of capitalism in which all profits belonged to the state.”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

“Volgens velen past Lenin als oproerkraaier, als atheïstische omvergooier van de macht, niet langer in het patriottische neo-imperalistische, Russisch-orthodoxe narratief; zijn zijn dagen als gebalsemd lijk in het mausoleum geteld.”
― Pieter Waterdrinker, Tsjaikovskistraat 40: Een autobiografische vertelling uit Rusland

“В ідеологічних текстах теж ніхто не приховував, що російська мова таки рівніша. Мовляв, те, що всі мови в Союзі начебто рівноправні, не означає, що вони виконують однаковий об'єм суспільних функцій, бо ж у деяких і писемність не так давно з'явилася, та й, правду кажучи, російська накопичила надто великі багатства, аби її вважати рівноцінною з іншими. Тому мови СРСР «взаємозбагачуються». Був, правда, один незручний момент — цей «благотворний» взаємовплив виглядав як цілком односторонній процес. Російська відвойовувала собі простір, забираючи його у національних мов. Цей процес мило називався «взаємодопомогою» та навіть «розподілом праці». Дуже дбали, аби національні мови не перетрудились.”
― Євгенія Кузнєцова, Мова-меч. Як говорила радянська імперія

“In the carriages of the past, you can't go anywhere.”
― Maxim Gorky

“Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
― Sir Winston Churchill

“He was awake; it seemed like a long time, all dressed, sitting deep in the armchair, small with a grey face. I stopped ast the room entrance in silence, swallowed my words, and thought that maybe he didn’t even go to sleep that night. His facial colour reminded me of a teacher, dying from cancer.
‘Grandpa, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with you? Mother is coming home, did you hear?’ I came closer and touched his hand. It was colder than usual, and the frost went down my back. ‘Do you hear me? What’s wrong with you?’ I asked, and he was silent.
Suddenly, I understood everything.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 5: University of Life)


“‘Let me tell you this way. In the academy, we were told to marry early, before we go on the first shift. My first shift starts in a few months in July. I shall be half a year under the water in the submarine, carrying nuclear weapons. They advise us to marry and to make children as soon as possible because who knows what will be on that shift. Also, I told you about the radiation. I know submariners’ who cannot make children because of the radiation on the ship,’ said Prohor.
‘How to explain to you, my girl? To make children, a man needs an erection but the radiation kills it. I am afraid until I reach the rank of admiral, I shall be impotent … unable to make children …,’ Prohor told sadly from his bed.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 6: Fiance from Submarine)


“So, it happened there; between the two biggest islands of two big enemies, Japan and the USSR.
‘Now I recall that Prohor praised that they can attack unexpectedly from a submarine, from under the water, with nuclear rockets.’ I was astonished that I knew all these things, which earlier had never interested me.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 7: Between Two Men)


“‘Do you remember what I told you before I died? You promised me to think big! My little star, if you think big, you will become big! Use my diamonds and the wall clock to become big! Dream big, Anfisa—and you will be more than just a wife to a man.
‘But remember, you have to take diamonds and the clock outside the USSR, where they value these things.’ I heard my grandfather’s voice live, close, but I didn’t see him.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 8: Earner Marriage No. 1)”
― Angelika Regossi

“I was one to one with a big nurse. Afraid to move and ask,
‘Whose blood is it so cold?’ … drop by drop … inside my small body.
But the blood from the looks of these opposite men was not cold. It was hot, even very hot, pumping into my head. One man, another, and one more, some older than others, some even with temples of grey hair. But what united them all was the interest in a ten-year-old girl.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 1: The Girl Felt a Woman)


“We sat together, at the bottom of the trench, on the cold and dry ground. The sun slowly was going down, and the first signs of the cold September evening appeared. Tanya pulled out the matches and lit the cigarette butts, and we started to smoke; two small girls of seven and five. We thought that nobody was seeing us making the fumes.
Suddenly, I saw Tanya’s sister go out to the balcony of their flat, looking around the yard. When she noticed the fumes from the trench, she screamed at the whole yard,
‘Tanya! Tanya! I see you. Come immediately home!’
‘Why! Am I cold?’ shouted back Tanya, pressing the cigarette butt in the trench soil.
‘No! You want to eat!’ screamed her sister. They both imitated a joke about a caring mother.
Tanya stood up, climbed out of the trench, and left. I remained sitting alone, and it was getting dark. I also wanted to go home, wash my hands and eat. When suddenly, I heard a soft man’s voice from the darkness,
‘Let me help you to get out of the trench, little girl.’”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 2: The Paedophile Play)


“In the USSR, at schools, sometimes was carried a medical check-up for teenage girls from fourteen to seventeen years old, till the end of their school life. It was a very psychologically traumatic and humiliating experience because of the process itself, and because the results were reported to the school director, parents, and sometimes, even to the police. The girls were tested for virginity, but the boys were not.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 3: Long Ten Years)


“At that time, execution was allowed in the USSR, also for women. The maximum that prisoners could get was fifteen years. After that, capital punishment was the last measure. Mainly, the execution took place in the prison corridor by shooting the back of the inmate when he or she was taken to go somewhere, or in the prison yard. Executions were usually done by policemen.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 4: Prison for Woman)”
― Angelika Regossi, Love in Communism: A Young Woman's Adult Story

“He was awake; it seemed like a long time, all dressed, sitting deep in the armchair, small with a grey face. I stopped at the room entrance in silence, swallowed my words, and thought that maybe he didn’t even go to sleep that night. His facial colour reminded me of a teacher, dying from cancer.
‘Grandpa, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with you? Mother is coming home, did you hear?’ I came closer and touched his hand. It was colder than usual, and the frost went down my back. ‘Do you hear me? What’s wrong with you?’ I asked, and he was silent.
Suddenly, I understood everything.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 5: University of Life)


“‘Let me tell you this way. In the academy, we were told to marry early, before we go on the first shift. My first shift starts in a few months in July. I shall be half a year under the water in the submarine, carrying nuclear weapons. They advise us to marry and to make children as soon as possible because who knows what will be on that shift. Also, I told you about the radiation. I know submariners’ who cannot make children because of the radiation on the ship,’ said Prohor.
‘How to explain to you, my girl? To make children, a man needs an erection but the radiation kills it. I am afraid until I reach the rank of admiral, I shall be impotent … unable to make children …,’ Prohor told sadly from his bed.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 6: Fiance from Submarine)


“So, it happened there; between the two biggest islands of two big enemies, Japan and the USSR.
‘Now I recall that Prohor praised that they can attack unexpectedly from a submarine, from under the water, with nuclear rockets.’ I was astonished that I knew all these things, which earlier had never interested me.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 7: Between Two Men)


“‘Do you remember what I told you before I died? You promised me to think big! My little star, if you think big, you will become big! Use my diamonds and the wall clock to become big! Dream big, Anfisa—and you will be more than just a wife to a man.
‘But remember, you have to take diamonds and the clock outside the USSR, where they value these things.’ I heard my grandfather’s voice live, close, but I didn’t see him.”
(-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 8: Earner Marriage No. 1)”
― Angelika Regossi, Love in Communism: A Young Woman's Adult Story

“In the final analysis, truth will always triumph in mankind’s historical progress. Soviet literature’s strength lies in the fact that it offers the world the truth about Soviet man, the Soviet way of life, and communism.”
― Albert Belyaev, The Ideological Struggle and Literature: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of US Sovietologists

“If you plug your ears
from the Soviet anthem,
it sounds like an SS march.”
― Sfarda L. Gül, Earth Hagiography

“Вѣдь нужно быть законченнымъ слѣпцомъ, чтобы воображать, будто совѣтская оккупація или инфильтрація сдѣлала Русское національное государство чтимымъ или «популярнымъ» въ Финляндіи, Эстоніи, Латвіи, Литвѣ, Польшѣ, Галиціи, Австріи, Германіи, Чехіи, Венгріи, Румыніи, Болгаріи, Югославіи, Албаніи и Греціи; будто солдатскія изнасилованія женщинъ, чекистскіе аресты, увозы и казни, насажденіе политическаго доносительства, избіенія и разстрѣлы лидеровъ крестьянской и либеральной оппозиціи въ этих�� странахъ, пытки въ тюрьмахъ, концлагеря, фальшивыя голосованія, а также преднамѣренная повсемѣстная инфляція, всѣ эти имущественные передѣлы, конфискаціи и соціализаціи — привѣтствуются этими несчастными народами, какъ «заря свободы» или какъ «истинная демократія», какъ «желанные дары» «великой Россіи»... На самомъ же дѣлѣ въ этихъ странахъ сѣется дьявольское сѣмя и растетъ ненависть къ національной Россіи.”
― Иван Ильин, Советский Союз - не Россия

“In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As his later cool relationship with Moscow was to show, he was far too independent-minded to take orders from the doctrinaire Soviets. Even if they did try to recruit him, the attempt was doomed to fail. 'They are full of self-importance and convinced that only they hold the truth. There is no truth other than theirs,' he fumed bitterly in front of one of his lawyers years later. To the same lawyer he also said that he hated the Russian Communists. He made a point of reaffirming his independence from Moscow, a matter of national pride in his eyes. 'Unlike other parties, the Venezuelan Communist Party is not pledged to Moscow, although it does have privileged relations with the Soviet Union. Venezuelans are a proud people. There is a strong libertarian tradition in the country.'

Hans-Joachim Klein, Ilich's fellow traveller for almost six months in the mid-1970s, recalled his antipathy towards the Russian Communists: 'He didn't like them. He thought they were corrupt. He did not define himself as a Marxist, but rather as an international revolutionary, a bit like Che Guevara.' Klein dismissed out of hand the story that Ilich was a KGB agent: 'That's a joke. He was expelled from Lumumba University after he took part in a demonstration. They don't really like that over there.”
― John Follain, Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal