Lenin's Tomb 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. MILAN KUNDERA”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“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

“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

“Nor could they compete very well with the immensity of the Stalin cult in all its forms: the parades celebrating Stalin as a god on earth, the newspapers describing his heroic deeds, the radio addresses, the history books written by the Kremlin ideologists, the rallies and paramilitary drills of the Young Pioneers.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Memorial, Elena said, wanted to “give a name” to the victims of the Stalin era;”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“in Moscow, being paranoid doesn’t mean doom is not on the way.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

“Many people could not understand that the idea of government is not to provide, the way parents provide for a child.”
― David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire