Soviet Union Quotes

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
― Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

“My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
― George F. Kennan

“He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you."

"Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Skeleton Key

“That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

“It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.

It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?

If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism

“Over the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in it—but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work (and are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, and trade union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers and accountants—the mechanical slaves of Debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education). All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here, not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle bow.

And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and good family enough in themselves to produce and intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations [...] we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.”
― Victor Kravchenko

“From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn’t returning to New York anytime soon.

You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they’ve ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about “going beyond the cordon” when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

P. 196”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.

P. 41”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

pp. 181-182”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“La situación actual se parece un poco al chiste que hacían los trabajadores de la antigua Unión Soviética: «¡Nosotros hacemos como que trabajamos y usted hace como que nos paga!»”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

“В 1960-х годах в этих местах выросли стройные ряды бело-желтых пятиэтажек, в которых давали квартиры в основном рабочим близлежащих производств. Поначалу новоселы верили, что будет здесь настоящий город-сад с высокими домами, красивыми детскими площадками, школами и магазинами. Когда же спустя много лет все это действительно появилось, никто уже ни во что не верил.”
― Елизавета Бута, Битцевский маньяк. Шахматист с молотком (Мир глазами убийцы)

“Soviet identity was a paradox: Muslim by tradition, atheist by obligation.”
― Angelika Regossi, Russian Colonial Food: Journey through the dissolved Communist Empire

“Christopher Boyce said when he had wanted to end his spying for the Soviets he couldn’t because Andrew Daulton Lee was enjoying the money they were making from the Russians so much that he said if Chris didn’t continue to provide him with secrets from the Black Vault he would tell Chris’s father about what they had done.”
― Robert Lindsey, The Flight of the Falcon

“The notion that successful reform can emerge exclusively from within the ruling elite belongs among Russia’s most enduring and self-perpetuating myths, shared by figures as diverse as Gorbachev and Putin. Reforms initiated from outside the elite, so the argument goes, are doomed to failure, mass violence, or both. Never mind that such reforms have often been stymied by the elite itself, fearful of losing its monopoly of power, or that numerous reforms initiated from above have failed miserably.”
― Benjamin Nathans

“When his fingers touched the bread during the inspection of his duffel bag, and he inhaled its warm rye scent, Peeter could no longer restrain himself. He broke off a small piece, placed it in his mouth, and chewed for a long time, trying – if only briefly – to deceive the constant hunger. For a moment, it worked: he swallowed the paste-like pap, felt a rush of euphoria, and quietly fell asleep.
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two


Context note: During prisoner transports to the Gulag, hunger was constant. Even a single bite of bread could bring brief relief – and an almost euphoric sense of escape from terrible reality.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камень. Биографический роман. Книга вторая. Непростые дороги в ад: Выживание в условиях насилия

“– Independent farmers are arrested and deported somewhere to the Urals or Siberia. I fear we may be the next to be labeled ‘kulaks’.
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two


Context note: During the forced collectivization in the USSR, millions of peasants were forcibly deported to remote regions such as Siberia and the Urals as part of state repression against on wealthy peasants (nicknamed "kulaks" by the Soviet authorities).”
― Володимир Шабля, Камень. Биографический роман. Книга вторая. Непростые дороги в ад: Выживание в условиях насилия

“Stalin perceived the world in stark black and white. In the same way, he divided people, nations, actions, and ideas into only two absolute categories: “ours” and “theirs.”
“Ours” were all those — and everything — that, at the moment of decision, fell under his control or contributed to strengthening it. “Theirs” were everyone else, and everything else.
He saw his role as a strategist in constructing a system of power that would force each of the “ours,” individually and collectively, to work at the very limit of human endurance in order to fulfill his strategic design.
That design was simple and ruthless: to endlessly increase the number and strength of the “ours” by coercing the “theirs” into becoming “ours,” while simultaneously destroying — or, as a last resort, neutralizing — all who refused to submit.
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One


Context note:
This passage reflects the ideological logic of Stalinist totalitarianism, where power was built on absolute division, forced loyalty, and systematic repression. In the Soviet worldview of the 1930s–1940s, survival depended on belonging to “ours” — or being destroyed as “theirs.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно

“Somewhere nearby, artillery thundered. Vast fields — flat as a table, without a single tree — turned any moving figure into an easy target against the monotonous landscape, drawing German pilots toward whatever appeared below.
Twice already, the exhausted and terrified prisoners were strafed by Junkers aircraft returning from their missions, deciding to use up their remaining ammunition. At the command of the group leader — a State Security lieutenant — everyone scattered in all directions. Yet despite this, nearly twenty people, including soldiers, were killed by the bullets of the German vultures.
Roughly the same number were executed by the guards themselves. Anyone seriously wounded, anyone unable to keep walking, was shot on the spot.
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One


Context note:
During the first weeks of the German–Soviet War in 1941, prisoners and soldiers are driven across the open steppe. Caught between German air attacks and Soviet security forces, the weak and wounded are systematically eliminated. The scene exposes the brutal logic of total war on the Eastern Front.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно

“My blissful childhood was shattered without warning when I was about ten years old. One day, my father told me that he had spent seventeen years of his life in prisons, Gulag labor camps, and internal exile. At that moment, his confession became the greatest shock I had ever experienced.
“My father — the kindest and wisest man on earth — and suddenly this?” I refused to believe my own ears.
But my dad did not stop at the bare fact. He spoke of hunger, of cruelty, of utter powerlessness — and of his own horrific existence within a totalitarian, inhuman system.
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One. Author's Preface


Context note:
This passage comes from the author’s preface and reflects a real childhood revelation that became the moral and emotional foundation of the novel. Learning that his father had survived years of prisons, labor camps, and exile under the Soviet totalitarian system, the author transformed personal memory into a literary quest to understand repression, trauma, and human endurance.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно