Russian Revolution Quotes

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“We should be used to it," Tatiana reasons. "There have always been lines separating us from the rest of the world, whether they were satin ribbons or iron rails.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.”
― Amadeo Bordiga

“Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer... ("Letter To Stalin")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“Ever since he repented of religion and shaved off his clerical beard and mustache, he has had the constant feeling that he has taken off his trousers, and that his nose protrudes altogether indecently and must at all cost be covered. It's sheer torment!

With one hand over his nose, the deacon knocks again and again. No one responds. And yet Martha is home; the gate is locked from within. And that means - what? It means that she is with someone else... The deacon punctuates the scene inwardly with the three dots we have graphically depicted just above, and, tripping over them at every second step, he proceeds to Rosa Luxemburg Street. ("X")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“...some men say get them crying on your shoulder and you have the sheets half-unfurled already. Other fellows say get them laughing. I say get them drunk. I ordered up more Riesling...”
― Stewart Hennessey, Comrade Fox: Low-living in Revolutionary Russia

“This particular May morning begins with the appearance of a procession on the corner of Pancake and Rosa Luxemburg Streets. The procession is evidently religious: it consists of eight clerical personages, well known to the entire town. But instead of censers, the clerical personages are swinging brooms, which transfers the entire action from the plane of religion to the plane of revolution. These personages are now simply unproductive elements of society performing their labor duty for the benefit of the people. Instead of prayers, golden clouds of dust rise to the heavens. ("X")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turn into the Russian revolution. Take Blok’s “We the children of Russia’s terrible years”, and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors and terrifying – there lies the difference.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“All revolutions have liberté, égalité, fraternité, and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise; mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized. They have the intoxicating illusion of personifying the will of the people, which means they assume the people is monolithic. They are Manicheans, dividing the world into two camps: light and darkness, the revolution and its enemies. They despise all traditions, received wisdom, icons, and superstition. They believe society can be a tabula rasa on which the revolution will write.”
― Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932

“Тогда пришла не правда на русскую землю. Главной бедой, корнем будущего зла была утрата веры в цену собственного мнения. Вообразили, что время, когда следовали внушениям нравственного чутья, миновало, что теперь надо петь с общего голоса и жить чужими, всем навязанными представлениями.”
― Борис Пастернак, Доктор Живаго: Повести ; Статьи и очерки

“Я думаю, коллективизация была ложной, неудавшейся мерою, и в ошибке нельзя было признаться. Чтобы скрыть неудачу, надо было всеми средствами устрашения отучить людей судить и думать и принудить их видеть несуществующее и доказывать обратное очевидности. Отсюда беспримерная жестокость ежовщины, обнародование не рассчитанной на применение конституции, введение выборов, не основанных на выборном начале.”
― Борис Пастернак, Доктор Живаго: Повести ; Статьи и очерки

“¡Obreros! Picad el miedo.
Vuestra es la tierra desnuda.
Saltad el hambre y la muerte
por sobre la honda laguna,
y uníos a los campesinos,
y a los que en caña se anudan.
¡Rómpanse un millón de puños
contra moral tan injusta!
¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos
como se alzaron en Rusia!

Workers! Slash the fear.
Yours is the naked earth.
Leap hunger and death
over the deep lagoon,
and join the peasants
and those knotted to the cane.
Break a million fists
against so unjust a morality!
Raise, raise your arms
like they were raised in Russia!

("Desde el Puente Martín Peña")”
― Julia de Burgos

“My Russia My Responsibility (The Sonnet)

Moya Rossiya, moya lyubov, I am sorry,
That the world has turned its back on us.
But can you really blame them when,
We accepted a terrorist as a leader of ours!
Awake, arise, my brave comrades,
Drink deep from the valor of Volga.
I say, enough with apathy, for it is high time,
To sanitize our land against all domestic virus.
We let a terrorist loose on our neighbors,
And all that bloodshed is on our hands.
Even now if we don't mend our horrific error,
One savage will turn our world into a wasteland.
Mnogo te obicham, for you are still my home.
To humanize our home is the duty of none but our own.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“Моя Россия моя ответственность.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“Prior to January 22, 1905, the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small handful of people, and the reformists of those days, derisively called us a 'sect'. Within a few months, however, the picture completely changed. The hundreds of revolutionary Social Democrats 'suddenly' grew into thousands; the thousands became leaders of between two and three million proletarians.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“The law of combined development of backward countries – in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors – here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war – that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development – and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.”
― Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

“Пачнецца рэвалюцыя, і ўсё зменіцца раптоўна і стыхійна. І той, хто становіцца цяпер на калені перад царскім поездам, пойдзе з коллем на самога цара.”
― Якуб Колас, Новая зямля

“Ужо адзін той факт, сведкам якога быў Лабановіч яшчэ на Палессі і які глыбока запаў яму ў памяць — зʼяўленне поезда пасля доўгай забастоўкі чыгуначнікаў,— пахіснуў яго веру ў перамогу рэвалюцыі. Цяпер жа не падлягала сумненню, што ў барацьбе з народам брала верх самаўладства. Варта было абегла зірнуць на хроніку, што змяшчалася на старонках тагачасных часопісаў, на царскія загады, на розныя цыркуляры, каб пераканацца ў гэтым. Усё, што хоць у нязначнай меры ішло ад свабоды і прагрэсу, бязлітасна нішчылася пятамі царскіх сатрапаў. А побач з гэтым вынікалі чарнасоценныя манархічныя саюзы. На паверхню ўсплывалі такія імёны, як Дубровін, Булацаль, Грынгмут, Пурышкевіч і іншыя людскія пацяробкі. Ім была дана поўная свабода ў іх чалавеканенавісніцкай дзейнасці і агітацыі за цара, за прастол і «ісконныя ўстоі» царскага самаўладства.”
― Якуб Колас, На ростанях

“What is clearer is that suicide attacks, and our responses to them, have been central to the formation of the modern age. They helped create the conditions that caused the Russian Revolution; they were in the forefront of the minds of men who created a nuclear epoch and, unwittingly, the Cold War that followed; they were there at the beginning of the War on Terror that still dominates our headlines and they have helped drag the Middle East into the quagmire that it is today. In so doing, they have fuelled fears about migrants and refugees the world over, they have challenged the UN to its very core, and they have fed off conspiracy theories, post-truth propaganda and a view that the world is witnessing a millenarian clash of civilliations that heralds the end of days.”
― Iain Overton, The Price of Paradise

“These buildings and these books, these expats and their expectations, all had an impact. The influence of France turned the theories of the French Enlightenment into something more than just ideas in Russia - they became physical. They became revolution. And at the heart of that revolution lay philosophies about the freedom of the individual, one where the imperial shackles of social, political and religious dogma were seen clearly and where the call for them to be shaken off was heard loudly.”
― Iain Overton, The Price of Paradise