Lenin's Brother Quotes

“It’s impossible to frighten such people….”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“In Russia there will always be small groups of people, so dedicated to their ideas and so passionately feeling the misery of their homeland, that they will not think it a sacrifice to die for their cause.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“During his gymnasium years he read Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, which gave him a fictional model of ascetic heroism. Osipanov claimed to have imitated Rakhmetov’s painful regime—designed to harden him for torture—of sleeping on a board with nails sticking through it.25 Osipanov refused to carry poison with him to commit suicide in case of capture. At Kazan, the same university from which Vladimir Ulyanov was expelled in 1888, Osipanov started as a student of medicine and then transferred to law. He missed almost”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“The goal is the same—the quickest and surest destruction of this foul structure.1 In 1869 Nechaev murdered a member of his own revolutionary cell who tried to defect. He”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“The revolutionary despises any kind of doctrinarism and has rejected peaceful science, leaving it to future generations. He knows only one science—the science of destruction. For this and only for this he now studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, perhaps medicine. For this he studies day and night the living science of people, of the personalities and positions, and all the conditions of the present social structure in every possible stratum.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, by a total concept, a total passion—revolution. In the depths of his being not only in words but in action he has sundered any connection with the civil order and with the entire educated world and with all the laws, proprieties, conventions, and morality of this world. He is—its merciless enemy, and if he continues to live in it, then it is only in order the more certainly to destroy it.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“The first three rules of The Catechism eloquently summarize this credo. The revolutionary—is a doomed man. He has neither his own interests, nor affairs, nor feelings, nor attachments, nor property, nor even name.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“Ambivalence, I think, is the chief characteristic of my nation. There isn’t a Russian executioner who isn’t scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner. JOSEPH BRODSKY”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution