spoko

“Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“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

“Alone, mud-streaked, with weariness sinking into her very bones, a question haunted her—
Was this freedom?
The empty forest. Her fleeing, sick with dread. Was this what they had hoped for, all along?”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The deeper drama was not between signers and non signers, but within each individual signer. Putting one’s name on an open petition marked ‘a step toward internal liberation—and for many that step was decisive. This or that particular signature might have no significance whatsoever for the country’s political situation, but for the signer himself, it could become a kind of catharsis.”
― Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement