David Remnick > Quotes

“I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“One cannot exclude the possibility of a fascist period in Russia,” Staravoitova said on the radio station Echo of Moscow. “We can see too many parallels between Russia’s current situation and that of Germany after the Versailles Treaty. A great nation is humiliated, and many of its nationals live outside the country’s borders. The disintegration of an empire has taken place at a time when many people still have an imperialist mentality.… All this is happening at a time of economic crisis.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny,” Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. “The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise.” Yes,”
― David Remnick, Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

“These were children, after all, who were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-year-old Young Pioneer who was made a national hero and icon for all Soviet children when he served his collective by ratting on his own father for trying to hide grain from the police. These were children raised in schools designed according to the “socialist family” theories of Anton Makarenko, an ideology officer of the KGB. Makarenko insisted that children learn the supremacy of the collective over the individual, the political unit over the family. The schools, he said, must employ an iron discipline modeled on that of the Red Army and Siberian labor camps.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Just before his exile, Solzhenitsyn wrote his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” “Your dearest wish,” he informed them, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else it collapses.” And with that, Solzhenitsyn was gone.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Me, I always stayed away from him. Where I come from they have a saying: ‘The farther away you keep from the czar, the longer you stay alive.’ ”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow’s cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker’s point of view: the “friendship of peoples,” the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier’s reign over its satellite.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“But the symbolism of the miners' strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crown of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called "the masses." And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything—not even a bar of soap.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Perhaps one day Russia might even become somehow ordinary, a country of problems rather than catastrophes, a place that develops rather than explodes. That would be something to see.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“In the introduction, Amy Butler the senior minister at Riverside and a friend of Clinton's, referred to the Trump Administration as a source of anguish and confusion, and everyone nodded solemly'.”
― David Remnick

“I think it is a more courageous stance to abandon honestly something which has been devalued by history instead of carrying it to the end in your soul.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.”
― David Remnick

“He said that it was Ronald Reagan’s strategy of negotiation through strength that brought the Kremlin to its knees.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“people’s commissar, he was once as close to Stalin as Goering was to Hitler. He helped direct the collectivization program of the 1920s and early 1930s, a brutal campaign that annihilated the peasantry and left the villages of Ukraine strewn with an endless field of human husks. As the leader of the Moscow Party organization, Kaganovich built the city subway system and, briefly, had it named for himself. He was responsible as well for the destruction of dozens of churches and synagogues. He dynamited Christ the Savior, a magnificent cathedral in one of the oldest quarters of Moscow. It was said at the time that Stalin could see the cathedral belltower from his window and wanted it eliminated.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin’s victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She had picked him up on a beach three hundred miles away. His name was Garbage Belly. --John McPhee, Travels in Georgia (1973)”
― David Remnick, Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

“half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“On August 21, 1968, Pavel and six of his friends reacted with horror to the shortwave reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. For months they had been listening for every detail of the Prague Spring, cheering on Alexander Dubček’s attempt to create a “socialism with a human face.” They waited to see how Khrushchev’s conqueror and successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would deal with the rebellion of a satellite state. Would he show the same ruthlessness Khrushchev showed Hungary in 1956, or would there be a new sense of tolerance? Now the answer was clear.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“In their first year of medical school, students were informed that there were two species of human beings: Homo sapiens and Homo sovieticus.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“For a teenage girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Still, there was a heaviness to her manner, a kind of grim determination to get a message across, one last time.”
― David Remnick

“a cocktail of three parts gin to one part lime juice, honey, vermouth, and apricot brandy in equal portions—a cocktail so delicious”
― David Remnick, Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

“Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight,” Havel wrote, “which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“compromise”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Francis Bretherton, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Time that if the Great Plains became a dust bowl and people followed the seasonable temperatures north, Canada might replace the United States as the Western superpower.”
― David Remnick, The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change

“In “What Happened,” Clinton, by way of demanding national resolve against a Russian threat, quotes a maxim attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “You take a bayonet and you push. If you hit mush, you keep going; if you hit steel, you stop.”

“Were we mush?” I asked about the Obama Administration’s response.

Now she did not hesitate. “I think we were mushy,” she said. “Partly because we couldn’t believe it. Richard Clarke, who is one of our nation’s experts on terrorism, has written a book about Cassandras,” unheeded predictors of calamity. “And there was a collective Cassandra out there—my campaign was part of that—saying, ‘The Russians are in our electoral system, the Russians are weaponizing information, look at it!’ And everybody in the press basically thought we were overstating, exaggerating, making it up. And Comey wouldn’t confirm an investigation, so there was nothing to hold on to. And I think that the point Clarke makes is when you have an initial occurrence that has never happened before, some people might see it and try to warn about it, but most people would find it unlikely, impossible. And what I fear is we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of what the Russians did.”
― David Remnick

“Our afternoon slid by in a distraction of baseball and memory, and I almost felt myself at some dreamlike doubleheader involving the then and the now—the semi-anonymous strong young men waging their close, marvelous game on the sunlit green field before us while bygone players and heroes of baseball history—long gone now, most of them—replayed their vivid, famous innings for me in the words and recollections of my companion”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“When Communist Party chiefs in Russia went fishing, scuba divers plunged underwater and put fish on the hooks. When they went hunting, specially bred elk, stag, and deer were made to saunter across the field in point-blank range. Everyone had a wonderful time. When the king of Afghanistan visited the Tajik resort of Tiger Gorge, he blew away the last Turan tiger in the country.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire