{"quotes":[{"text":"In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.","author":"Lynne Viola","tags":["collectvization","communism","lenin","socialism","soviets","stalin","ussr"],"id":8053,"author_id":"Lynne+Viola"},{"text":"An imaginary friend once asked me why Americans can't stand Russia. The answer was cold, deadly, silent, and, well expected. It’s because in Soviet Russia nothing happens anymore, because it doesn’t exist anymore. And Americans are all about happenings. If there isn’t one – they don’t go where it isn’t, because there isn’t anything to happen to them there.","author":"Will Advise","tags":["america","answer","answers","cold","deadly","death","expectation","expectations","expected","friend","happening","happenings","imaginary","imagination","imagined","kgb","nothing","nsa","question","questions","russia","silence","silent","soviet-russia","soviet-union","ussr"],"id":23787,"author_id":"Will+Advise"},{"text":"Andrei Yanuaryevich (one longs to blurt out, “Jaguaryevich”) Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence-for evidence is always relative-or unchallengeable witnesses-for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces” (in other words, the superiority of someone who has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up) “and on his character” (I.E., his willingness to apply cruelty!)… In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute….","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["history","marxism","philosophy","politics","postmodernism","socialism","truth","ussr"],"id":51066,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"},{"text":"What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t.***An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous.Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin.***Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.","author":"Freda Utley","tags":["class-war","communism","germans","individualism","kulaks","peasants","protestantism","religion","soviet-union","ussr"],"id":106399,"author_id":"Freda+Utley"},{"text":"And I said, 'Do I have leprosy?' And they said, 'You are a dangerous element.","author":"David E Hoffman","tags":["oligarchs","quote","ussr"],"id":119515,"author_id":"David+E+Hoffman"},{"text":"Pope Pius XI called for a world-wide day of prayer, to be held on 16 March 1930, on behalf of the persecuted believers in Russia. This action led Stalin to suspend temporarily the antireligious campaign, according to Roy Medvedev.","author":"Lynne Viola","tags":["communism","pius-xi","pope","stalin","ussr"],"id":211810,"author_id":"Lynne+Viola"},{"text":"It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.","author":"Jorge Luis Borges","tags":["humour","united-states","ussr"],"id":213648,"author_id":"Jorge+Luis+Borges"},{"text":"LENIN = 'Revolutionary Social Democracy'American Socialists = 'Democratic Socialism'. What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.","author":"A.E. Samaan","tags":["central-planners","collectivism","communism","democracy","democratic-socialism","individual-rights","socialism","soviet-russia","soviet-union","ussr"],"id":221647,"author_id":"A.E.+Samaan"},{"text":"Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.","author":"Daron Acemoğlu","tags":["history","incentive","ussr"],"id":241717,"author_id":"Daron+Acemo%C4%9Flu"},{"text":"Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror.","author":"Freda Utley","tags":["communism","marxism","russia","socialism","soviet-union","stalin","ussr"],"id":286402,"author_id":"Freda+Utley"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}