Anna Louise Strong > Quotes

“To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.”
― Anna Louise Strong

“All Russians I knew hoped passionately that, with Hitler beaten, the War allies might continue friendship into long years of peace. They knew, of course - they had known all through the war - that there were elements in America that sabotaged the alliance, and even some who would rather see Hitler win. For two years while Russians perished by millions, they had watched their Allies delay the promised "second front" in the west.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Britain, however, under Prime Minister Chamberlain, built up Hitler, granting to him in haste everything that had for a decade been refused to the German Republic - the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi-terrorized plebiscite in the Saar, German re-armament, naval expansion, the Hitler-Mussolini intervention in Spain. British finance, which had strangled German democracy by demanding impossible reparations, helped Hitler with investments and loans. Every intelligent world citizen knew that these favors were given to Hitler because British Tories saw in him their 'strong-arm gangster' against the Soviets.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“The change in women's status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The revolution gave women legal and political equality; industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives 'called a strike' against wife beating and smashed that time-honored custom in a week.

'The men all jeered at the first woman we elected to our village soviet,'

a village president told me,

'but at the next election we elected six women and now it is we who laugh.'

I met twenty of these women presidents of villages in 1928 on a train in Siberia, bound for a Women's Congress in Moscow. For most it was their first trip by train and only one had ever been out of Siberia. They had been invited to Moscow 'to advise the government' on the demands of women; their counties elected them to go.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“When the government evacuated citizens from areas invaded by Hitler, deliberate preference was given to Jews. The reason was sound; Jews would surely be killed by the Germans while Russians had a better chance to survive. This policy saved some two million Jews from death, but did not endear them to the Russians left behind.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Russians in their hour of victory really hoped that their long isolation had ended; that their terrible war losses had brought for them the friendship of America and Britain, with long generations of peace. Week by week I saw that hope die in their faces. The change began with our atom-bomb on Hiroshima. Fear came back into eyes that had hardly yet seen peace. After the fear came the thought: Why had America slain a quarter of a million people in two Japanese cities, when Japan was already suing for peace?”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“His personal approach was modest, direct, simple; his analysis of problems was exceptionally clear. His technique for sizing up group opinion dates from his early days. 'I recall him well,' a veteran Bolshevik told me,

'a quiet youth who sat at the edge of the committee, saying little and listening much. Towards the end, he would make a comment, perhaps only as a question. Gradually, we came to see that he summed up the best of our joint thinking.'

This description will be recognized by anyone who ever sat in a discussion with Stalin. It explains how he kept his majority, for he sized up the majority before he laid down 'the line.' Thus, his mind was not that of a despot, who believes that orders can operate against the majority will. But neither was it that of the passive democrat, who awaits the vote and accepts it as final. Stalin knew that majority support is essential to sound political action; but he also knew how majorities are made. He first probed the thought of a group and then with his own words swung the decision as far as he could get the majority to go.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Russians had not grudged it when the world war turned both the Atlantic and Pacific into 'American lakes,' but when these same Americans, who had taken all the oceans and who were building bases on their islands and shores, called Russia greedy for taking back what she formerly owned, this ranked.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Month after month, the Russians, bearing the brunt of war, had waited. The Anglo-American landing did not come until June 6, 1944, when the Russian army had already liberated most of the USSR and was driving across Poland. Many Russians had bitterly wondered whether the Allies delayed so that Russia might take the loss, and landed at last in Normandy because they could not afford to let Russians take Berlin alone.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Three times, in my years in the USSR , it was decided to limit the police powers and bring the State Security organs under law; each time the name changed but the powers resumed. Such a police becomes a state within a state, with a vested interest in finding "plots," some of which really exist. Such a police presents another danger; its hidden membership is the first organization penetrated by enemy provocateurs.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“Neither Hitler nor the West had attacked each other seriously. The Western Front was in what was called 'the phony war'; both sides sat in their fortifications. Hitler was not yet prepared for an all-out assault westward; this took time to organize. And Hitler was also aware that he had friends in the British and French upper class who might yield to his demands. Important voices in the press of Britain, France and America urged that 'the wrong war' had started, that the war should be switched against the USSR as the greater enemy.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“I remembered those words when I heard that the Red Army had blown up the great Dnieper Dam and surrounding industries worth a quarter of a billion dollars all told. I know how the Soviet people loved that dam. I saw it three times during its building. I saw the workers competing on both sides of the river, putting up red stars at night to signal the progress of their work. That dam was the pride not only of its builders, but of the whole people. It symbolized Lenin’s great dream of electrifying the land. It was everything that the Tennessee Valley Authority meant to our Southern States – the coming of modern light, modern power, modern industry to a backward land.
Millions of men and women went without meat and butter and clothes that the Dnieper Dam might be swiftly built. They said: “We tighten our belts to build our future!” But every Soviet citizen would blow it up swiftly rather than see it fall to Hitler and be used to enslave the Ukrainian people.”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Soviets Expected It