Moscow Quotes

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Moscow was, as some said, the most beautiful mistress a man could ever want, but never cross her: like any good woman, she might just cut off your balls for the hell of it.”
― Marjorie M. Liu, Shadow Touch

“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

“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

“Moscow was an enormous city, but there was nowhere to go in it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air”
― Sana Krasikov

“The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk”
― Sana Krasikov

“Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov

“Die Rettung des Volkes liegt im Wodka.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2035

“যারা জেল খাটবে তাদের জন্য কিছু উপদেশ
গলায় ফাঁসি দিয়ে ঝোলাবার বদলে
তোমাকে ভেতরে ছুঁড়ে ফেলা হয়
আশা ত্যাগ না করার জন্য
এই জগতে, তোমার দেশ, আর জনগণ,
তুমি যদি দশ বা পনেরো বছর জেল খাটো
যা সময় বেঁচে আছে তা ছাড়া,
তুমি বলবে না
“দড়ির শেষ থেকে ঝুলতে পারলে বরং ভালো হতো
এক পতাকার মতন”---
তুমি মাটিতে পা ফেলবে আর বেঁচে থাকবে।
তা যদিও পুরো আনন্দের হবে না,
কিন্তু এটা তোমার পবিত্র কর্তব্য
আরও এক দিন বেঁচে থাকা
শত্রুকে জ্বালাতন করার জন্য ।
তোমার একাংশ একা ভেতরে থাকতে পারে,
কুয়োর তলদেশে ঢিলের মতন।
কিন্তু অন্য অংশ এমন ফাঁদে আটকে যাবে
জগতের ছুটোছুতিতে
যে ভেতরে তুমি শিহরিত হতে থাকবে
যখন বাইরে বেরোবে, চল্লিশ দিনের পরে, একটা পাতা নড়বে।
ভেতরে চিঠির জন্য অপেক্ষা করবে,
দুঃখি গান গাইবার জন্য,
কিংবা সারারাত শুয়ে থাকবে কড়িকাঠের দিকে তাকিয়ে
তা বেশ মিষ্টি কিন্তু বিপজ্জনক।
দাড়ি কামানো থেকে কামানোর মাঝে তোমার মুখের দিকে তাকাও,
তোমার বয়স ভুলে যাও,
উকুন খোঁজে
আর বসন্তকালের রাত,
আর সব সময়ে মনে রেখো
রুটির শেষ টুকরোটা পর্যন্ত খেয়ে ফেলতে হবে---
সেই সঙ্গে, দিলখোলা হাসি হাসতে ভুলো না ।
আর কেই বা বলতে পারে,
যে নারীকে তুমি ভালোবাসো সে তোমাকে ভালোবাসা বন্ধ করে দিয়েছে
বোলো না যে তা কোনো বড়ো ব্যাপার নয় :
ভেতরের মানুষটার কাছে
তা গাছের সবুজ ডাল ভেংএ ফেলা ।
ভেতরে গোলাপ আর বাগানের চিন্তা করা কারাপ,
সমুদ্র আর পাহাড়ের চিন্তা করা ভালো।
বিশ্রাম নি নিয়ে পড়ো আর লেখো
আর আমি বোনবার পরামর্শও দেবো
আর আয়না তৈরি করার ।
আমি বলতে চাই, এমন নয় যে তুমি সময় কাটাতে পারবে না
দশ বা পনেরো বছর ভেতরে
আর বেশি--
তুমি পারবে,
যতক্ষণ না সেই মণি
যা তোমার বুকের বাঁ দিকে আছে তা জৌলুশ হারিয়ে ফেলছে !”
― Nazim Hikmet, Raksasa Bermata Biru

“We dined at a vegetarian restaurant with the enticing name ‘I Eat Nobody,’ and Tolstoy's picture prominent on the walls, and then sallied out into the streets.”
― John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World

“We drove across the Red Square past Lenin's Mausoleum and the towers and domes of the Kremlin--and stopped a block away at the Grand Hotel.

Our rooms were ready for us--clean and comfortable, with hot and cold water, homelike settees and deep roomy chairs. Courteous attendants were there, baths and elevator, a book shop and two restaurants. Everything that a hotel for white folks at home would have--except that, quite truthfully, there was no toilet paper. And no Jim Crow.

Of course, we knew that one of the basic principles of the Soviet Union is the end of all racial distinctions. That's the main reason we had come to Moscow.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“And another thing that makes Moscow different from Chicago or Cleveland, or New York, is that in the cities at home Negroes--like me--must stay away from a great many places--hotels, clubs, parks, theatres, factories, offices, and union halls--because they are not white. And in Moscow, all the doors are open to us just the same of course, and I find myself forgetting that the Russians are white folks. They're too damn decent and polite. To walk into a big hotel without the doorman yelling at me (at my age), "Hey, boy, where're you going?" Or to sit at the table in any public restaurant and not be told, "We don't serve Negroes here." Or to have the right of seeking a job at any factory or in any office where I am qualified to work and never be turned down on account of color or a WHITE ONLY sign at the door. To dance with a white woman in the dining room of a fine restaurant and not be dragged out by the neck--is to wonder if you're really living in a city full of white folks (as is like Moscow).

But then the papers of the other lands are always calling the Muscovites red. I guess it's the red that makes the difference. I'll be glad when Chicago gets that way, and Birmingham.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“There is in Moscow a great curiosity for things American, and a great sympathy for things Negro. So, being both an American and a Negro, I am met everywhere with friendly questions from children and adults as to how we live at home. Is there really a crisis, with people hungry and ragged when there are in America so many factories, so much technique, so much wheat, and cotton and livestock? How can that be? Do they actually kill people in electric chairs? Actually lynch Negroes? Why?

The children in the Moscow streets, wise little city children, will oft times gather around you if you are waiting for a streetcar, or looking into a shop window. They will take your hand and ask you about the Scottsboro boys, or if you like the Soviet Union and are going to stay forever. Sometimes as you pass a group of children playing, they will stop and exclaim, "Negro!" But in wonder and surprise a long ways from the insulting derision of the word "Nigger" in the mouths of America's white children. Here, the youth in the schools are taught to respect all races.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“You never miss the water till the well runs dry. Those who ought to know, tell me that you never really appreciate Moscow until you get back again to the land of the bread lines, unemployment, Jim Crow cars and crooked politicians, brutal bankers and overbearing police, three per cent beer and the Scottsboro case.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“In Moscow I asked how these things were achieved. I was told that the whole theory of the Communist state was opposed to the separation of peoples on religious or racial grounds, and that workers had no strength divided up into warring camps. I was told the Soviet schools taught that all men are equal.

I said, "The theory of our American democracy is that all men are equal, too--except that where I live it does not seem to work out that way. Theories are all right--but how do you make them work in Russia?"

"Here we have laws against racial intolerance," they said.

I said, "We have such laws in some of our American cities, too, but often the laws do not work."

The Russians said, "In the Soviet Union, we make them work. Here nobody dares insult or spit on or hurt a Jew simply because he is a Jew any more.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?”
― Sana Krasikov

“Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own”
― Sana Krasikov

“Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories”
― Sana Krasikov

“From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past”
― Sana Krasikov

“In a snow-white field near Moscow, I want you above all to hear how sad my living voice is.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Napoleon recalled his dismay at seeing 'mountains of swirling red flames, like huge ocean waves, exploding up into the sky of fire, then sinking into the sea of flames below'.”
― Stephen Clarke, How the French Won Waterloo: Or Think They Did

“Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.”
― Stephen Clarke, How the French Won Waterloo: Or Think They Did

“I will die in Moscow, not seeing Ukraina. Before death, I will ask Stalin to extract my heart, just before I am burnt in the crematory, from my chest and bury it in my native land, in Kyiv, somewhere above the Dnipro on the mountain-hill. Fate, send happiness to people on this ruined and bloodstained land!
Disappear, hatred! Evanesce, poverty!”
― Олександр Довженко, Щоденникові записи, 1939-1956 / Дневниковые записи, 1939-1956

“What actually happened was this. Over the last twenty years, we have delighted in our children, and have had many of them. We don’t shuttle them off to day care or leave them with professional care providers. And we homeschool them or have them in schools which encourage direct parental involvement. Our families are tight. We have had many children because we love them, despite hostile stares or comments from those outside our community. To quote a comment made to my wife on the street years ago, “My, you don’t believe in the pill, do you?” But we didn’t mind—kids are a kick. And, as I can now say, grandkids are a kick. It just keeps getting better.

But then one day, we were distracted from our work by all this yelling that was coming from the general direction of the Moscow School District. “Where have the kids gone!? How could this have happened? Maybe they moved out of the state!” And the powers that be put lighter fluid in their hair, set it ablaze, and ran in tight little circles. “Where are the kids?” You see the state takes away money for each little breathing bipedal carbon unit that doesn’t show up in the classroom each autumn, and it turns out this is serious business.

So, against my better judgment, I say something like this: “Um—maybe you don’t have kids in your schools because you quit having them. And if any actually make it into the womb, you think it should be legal to get them out of there violently. Talk about eviction. And if any of successfully run that gauntlet and actually show up, you provide them with a fifth-rate education and then turn them loose into your hollow and ugly world. And maybe you don’t have access to our kids anymore because we looked at all this and quit handing them to you to educate. Just a thought.”

Take care not to get the whole thing turned around. Susan’s sign-off—“breeding my way to a better tomorrow” reminds me of a joke that can be reapplied to our situation. Early in the twentieth century, a refined woman from Boston was at a high brow social gathering where she met a woman from Chicago, who didn’t quite fit with the refined lady’s ideas of deportment. “Here in Boston,” the great lady said with a sniff, “we think breeding is everything.” “Well,” the other lady said, “out in Chicago we think it is a lot of fun, but we don’t think it’s everything.”
― Douglas Wilson, Apologetics in the Void: Hometown Hurly-Burly

“Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair.”
― Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country

“No, I had no dollars. The man struggled spider-legged away through the rain, leaving me struck by the illogic of things”
― Colin Thubron, Among the Russians

“With my own eyes I have seen sailors taking a man out onto the ice in order to shoot him - and I have seen the condemned man hopping over puddles to keep his feet dry and turning up his collar to shield his chest from the wind. Those few steps were the last steps he would ever take, and instinctively he wanted to make them as comfortable as possible.

We were no different. We bought ourselves some "last scraps" of fabric. We listened for the last time to the last operetta and the last exquisitely erotic verses. What did it matter whether the verses were good or terrible? All that mattered was not to know, not to be aware - we had to forget that we were being led onto the ice.”
― Teffi, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

“The more one knows,
the sooner one grows old.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“The virus of independence-seeking is also spreading in Africa. The Cold War is raging in full force and both power blocs are trying to increase their influence by harnessing the black intelligentsia in the colonies to their respective chariots. Through foreign embassies, the most able students are tracked down and ideologically groomed to play a political role. The colonies must become independent in favour of the neo-colonial policies of Washington and Moscow!”
― André-Bernard Ergo, Congo belge: La colonie assassinée