Arkady Ostrovsky > Quotes

“Idle conversations around a kitchen table among the liberal intelligentsia all too often were a substitute for real action or work; it gave them relief, but yielded few results. It created a comfortable cocoon, but also increased the intelligentsia's isolation from the rest of the country”
― Arkady Ostrovsky

“decency.”’14 Decency and common”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

“Above all, [Averintsev] argued, do not distort reality. Facing the past was one thing; reinventing it was quite another. “Christ tells people to return from the imagined world to reality and from the imagined self to one’s actual self. A return to God is possible from any real place - however shameful and disgusting, but not from an imagined one - because we are not there. An imagined self in an imagined world cannot start a journey toward God.”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

“In 1999 politics was replaced by political technology, citizens by spectators, reality by television. “Media became a branch of state power,” Pavlovsky said.20 The idea that by means of television a group of “political technologists” and media managers could create a president out of someone nobody had ever heard of seemed incredible. This”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

“After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

“there was a time when patriotism did not translate into xenophobia, when pragmatism did not justify dishonor and when irony did not rule out love for your country.”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

“Donald Maclean, a British diplomat who had spied for the KGB. “Maclean said: ‘People who read Pravda every day are invincible.’ People who are well informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking,” Kalugin”
― Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News