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December 11, 2019 - January 26, 2020
“I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.”
Us media @ present
People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.
There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born…
“A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who’s understood him.”
The Lubyanka is an infamous Moscow prison that also served as the KGB headquarters in Soviet times. Its name is synonymous with the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet secret police, especially during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Today, it houses the directorate of the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation, the FSB.
My father fought in the Russo-Finnish War, he never understood what he’d been fighting for, but they told him to go, so he went.
An abundance. But heaps of salami have nothing to do with happiness. Or glory. We used to be a great nation! Now we’re nothing but peddlers and looters…grain merchants and managers…
The only thing that could hold a society like this together was fear. Extreme conditions—execute and imprison as many people as possible.
Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others.
Our Soviet life…you could say that it was an attempt at creating an alternative civilization. If you want to put it in dramatic terms…The power of the people! I can’t calm down about it!
Religion is the opiate of the masses,” “All worship of a divinity is necrophilia.”
We’d read the memoirs…Naturally, our conversations all revolved around the same things…What freedom? Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.
After reading Solzhenitsyn, I realized that the ‘beautiful ideals of communism’ were all drenched in blood. It was all a lie…”
tell everyone: look at the Chinese…They have their own path. They’re not dependent on anyone, they don’t try to imitate anyone. Today, the whole world is afraid of China…
Everyone had come to die honorably. We were all well aware that this machine had been grinding people into sand for seventy years…Nobody thought that it would break down so easily…Without major bloodshed.
walk and think: Earthly life isn’t the end. Death gives the soul some open space…
Vodka is worth more than—what’s it called?—that American dollar. You can buy anything with vodka. You can use it to pay the plumber and the electrician, too. Otherwise, they won’t even come.
After Stalin died, people started smiling again; before that, they lived carefully. Without smiles.
We believed that one day, we’d live to see the good life. Just wait and see, wait and suffer…Yes, wait and see…We spent our whole lives shuttling between bunkers, dormitories, and barracks.
The Cheka was the Soviet secret police, established by Lenin in 1917 and first led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a predecessor to the NKVD and, in turn, the KGB. Officers of the secret police were colloquially known as “Chekisty” or Chekists until the fall of the Soviet Union.
My grandmother was born in 1922. Her whole life, people had been shot and executed. Arrested. That was all she’d ever known…
What had to have happened to us…the Soviet people…to make us close our eyes and run to this motherfucking capitalist paradise?
remember the thirties…People like me came of age in those years. Tens of millions of us. And we consciously built socialism. We were prepared to make any and all necessary sacrifices. I don’t agree with General Volkogonov, who wrote that the only thing that existed in those pre-war years was Stalinism.
Everything is for sale. The man on the street will be over the moon, what a good jolt of adrenaline…It’s not every day that an empire falls. There it is, lying face down in the mud! All bloody! And it’s not every day that a Marshal of the empire kills himself…Hangs himself from a Kremlin radiator.
History records the lives of ideas. People don’t write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.
Stalin created a state that was impossible to puncture from below; it was impenetrable. But from above, it was vulnerable and defenseless. No one thought that they would start destroying it from the top, that the top leaders would be the ones to betray it first.
We need a large and powerful military, our territory is enormous! We have borders with half of the world! People respect us as long as we’re strong, but if we become weak, no “new way of thinking” will convince anyone of anything.
Our country has a tsarist mentality, it’s subconsciously tsarist.
We were hurtling into an abyss. We had a great nation, it was victorious in a terrifying war, and it was collapsing. China didn’t fall. And neither did North Korea, where the people were starving to death. While little socialist Cuba stood, we were falling. And we weren’t defeated by tanks and missiles, we were destroyed by our own greatest strength: our spirit. The system and the Party rotted from the inside.
The USSR gave thousands of people like him a chance. Poor, simple people…And he loved the Soviet state back.
They couldn’t forget 1941…the Soviet Army’s humiliating retreat to Moscow. How soldiers were sent into battle empty-handed and told that they’d win their weapons in combat. They didn’t count the people, but they did count the rounds of ammunition. It’s understandable…It makes sense that people with these kinds of memories believed that in order to defeat the enemy, we needed to keep pumping out tanks and fighter jets. The more the better. There ended up being enough weapons for the USSR and America to destroy one another a thousand times over. And yet they kept making more. Then a new
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He couldn’t participate in the annihilation of something he’d devoted his life to…[A pause.] The world became unipolar; now, it belongs to America. We became weak, we were pushed to the sidelines. Turned into a third-rate defeated country. We won World War II, but we lost World War III.
Who sold Russia out? The Jews. The Rootless. The kike has made God weep many times over.
SMERSH was a counterespionage unit tasked with identifying and punishing spies and traitors during the war. It was, essentially, an instrument of terror within the army.
remember the city that night, walking together with the book in my purse. We handled it like it was a secret weapon…That’s how ardently we believed that the word could change the world.
Even though I was beyond exhausted…Guess! I always had The Gulag Archipelago under my arm, and I would immediately open it and start reading. In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn. Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world.
Somewhere out there, there’s something else. What? Something…just over there…Like a whole world that’s brighter, more meaningful than the one that you live in, like something more important is happening just over our horizon.
We were raised like young warriors in ancient Sparta: If the Motherland called, we’d sit on a hedgehog for Her.
What was a sack of sugar in the nineties? An entire subsistence! Money! Money! The beginning of capitalism…You could become a millionaire overnight or get a bullet to the head.
No one was itching to peddle pots and pans. And now, there’s no choice: You either feed your family or you hang on to your sovok ideals. It’s either/or, no other options…
We had a great empire—stretching from sea to sea, from beyond the Arctic to the subtropics. Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb.
It was a great time! We will never live in such a big and strong country again. I cried when the Soviet Union collapsed. They began cursing us immediately. Slandering. The consumer triumphed. The louse. The worm.
We wanted to create Heaven on Earth. It’s a beautiful but impossible dream, man is not ready for it. He is not yet perfect enough.
We aren’t over communism yet. Don’t get your hopes up. And the world isn’t over it, either. Man will always dream of the City of the Sun.
And the truth is…I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you firsthand: Paper lies even more than people do.
For us, it was victory or death! Let us die as long as we know what we’re dying for.
A farce! Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it’s the law of the jungle: Devour the ones weaker than you, and bow down to the ones who are stronger. The oldest law in the world…[A
It’s easy to judge us fifty years later. To laugh…mock us old fools…but in those days, I marched in step with everyone else. And now, there’s nobody left…
They beat me. They really put their hearts into those beatings. And in the end, all of them ended up getting shot themselves. Or sent to the camps.
…One time I thought, “Socialism doesn’t solve the problem of death.” Of old age. The metaphysical meaning of life. It overlooks it. Only religion has answers to those questions.
