March 1917 Quotes

“How did we ever decide on this, Timofei? How did we get carried away that morning?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“Individual freedom is the new order’s cornerstone, but wasn’t the government obliged to deprive representatives of the old order of their freedom? It is in the name of imminent freedom that the government now cannot help but resort to violence. Yielding to the trap of sophisms about freedom means encouraging counterrevolution.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“. The great Russian state overthrow played a major role in the United States’ determination to enter the war. American circles had been sickened at an alliance with Russian autocracy. Americans did not trust the former Russia. They found German monarchism to be less incompatible with the free spirit of America than was Russian tsarism.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“The monarchy did not fall because there was a revolution; there was a revolution because the monarchy had immeasurably weakened. And now we could wend our way—only to Ruin.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“The monarchy did not fall because there was a revolution; there was a revolution because the monarchy had immeasurably weakened.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“Le-vel-lution—that means doing what’s good for the people! Not the bosses! It means everyone do what you like!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“he suggested and explained how to get organized (not as he had advised in 1905, ten-man detachments using bombs, knives, and kerosene—no!) now: by arming the popular masses entirely! Arm a popular militia drawn from the entire population without exception from sixty-five to fifteen (bring adolescents into political life!) and both sexes (tear women away from their stupefying kitchen circumstance!)—so that this militia becomes the basic organ of state administration! Only in this way, with a weapon in everyone’s hands, would they assure absolute order, the swift levy of grain, and then, soon after—peace and socialism!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4

“For over a century, fashionable, universal atheism, having flowed into Russia through the minds of Catherine’s magnates—and down, down, down, to the sons of village priests—had filled all the vessels of educated society and washed it of faith. For Russia’s educated circle, it had been decided long ago and irrevocably that any faith in the divine or belief in the incorporeal was laughable nonsense or unconscionable deception meant to distract the people from the one true path of democratic and material reconstruction, which would ensure universal well-being, which meant all the various conditions for all the various kinds of good.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4