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“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918��1956

“He who does not cry out the truth when he knows the truth becomes the accomplice of the liars and falsifiers.”
― Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin

“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what's it all for?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“That's how the world is arranged: they can take anyone's freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright—they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way.
They can do anything, but we cannot. That's why they are stronger than we.”
― Georgi Tenno, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“But just take the jurists' side for a moment: why, in fact, should a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view! It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the Interrogators, the prosecutor's staff, the internal guard in the prison, and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“A people eager to prejudge guilt as opposed to innocence, are a people ripe and ready to become a despot's "willing executioners".”
― A.E. Samaan

“But there was never any such thing as Stalinism. It was contrived by Khrushchev and his group in order to blame all the characteristic traits and principal defects of Communism on Stalin—it was a very effective move. But in reality Lenin had managed to give shape to all the main features before Stalin came to power.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

“Не могу здесь удержаться от комментария, как в те времена люди понимали события.

Едва был убит Киров, как сейчас же все заговорили, что Киров убит по приказу Сталина. То же самое об Орджоникидзе. О Горьком упрямо говорили, что он отравлен, так как не был согласен со Сталиным. Никто никогда не отделял Сталина от НКВД. В Киев Сталиным был послан Вышинский, занял под свою резиденцию Октябрьский дворец и принялся подписывать смертные приговоры сразу под огромными списками. Многих убивали тут же во дворце и сбрасывали трупы из окон в овраг. Все Это Киев прекрасно знал, и даже на что уж темная, глухая Куреневка и та точно ориентировалась в событиях.

Поэтому, когда много лет спустя Хрущев занялся «разоблачениями» Сталина, в Советском Союзе это не составило новости. Новостью был лишь сам курс на «разоблачение» и нескончаемые ряды чудовищных подробностей.

И тут некие «честные коммунисты» стали бить себя в грудь и кричать, что они, оказывается, ничего не знали. Или, что знали, но верили, что уничтожаются подлинные враги. Или, что думали, будто во всем виновато НКВД, а любимый Сталин не знает, и партия �� свята. Появилось много таких «честных коммунистов», отделяющих Сталина и партию от «ежовских» или «бериевских» преступлений.

Лицемеры. В душе все прекрасно все знали и понимали. Лишь только тот, кто НЕ ХОТЕЛ ЗНАТЬ �� «не знал». И лицемерил, и спасался лицемерием, и был стоек в своем лицемерии, и не без его помощи выжил, и оказался уже настолько органически лицемерием пропитан, что и сейчас лжет, доказывая, что миллионы членов партии были так умственно недоразвиты.

Так после разгрома Гитлера некоторые «честные фашисты» заявляли, что они не знали о чудовищных злодеяниях в лагерях смерти, или, что верили, будто во всем виновато лишь одно гестапо.

Лицемеры. Еще раз повторяю: не знал лишь тот, кто не хотел знать [90��91].”
― Анатолий Кузнецов, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

“It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“In addition, of course, they would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible officials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them understood what good merchandise was). "And who is going to guard them?" the newcomers asked skeptically. "Oh, come on now, who needs your things?" The bath personnel acted offended. "Go on in and don't worry." And they did go in. And the exit was through a different door, and after passing through it, they received back cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing! This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your positions, and your arrogance!) "Where are our things?" they cried. "Your things you left at home!" some chief or other bellowed at them. "In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp, we have communism! Forward march, leader!"
And if it was "communism," then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“All the values turn upside down with the years, and what was considered a privilege in the Special Purpose Camp of the twenties—to wear government-issue clothing—would become an annoyance in the Special Camp of the forties: there the privilege would be not to wear government-issue clothing, but to wear at least something of one's own, even just a cap. The reason here was not economic only but was a cry of the whole epoch: one decade saw as its ideal how to join in the common lot, and the other how to get away from it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin. They bought it. The bust was big and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow, both of them together, but the manager's status did not allow him to. "All right, you'll manage it if you take it slowly." And he went off ahead. The old watchman couldn't work out how to do it for a long time. If he tried to carry it at his side, he couldn't get his arm around it. If he tried to carry it in front of him, his back hurt and he was thrown off balance backward. Finally he figured out how to do it. He took off his belt, made a noose for Comrade Stalin, put it around his neck, and in this way carried it over his shoulder through the village. Well, there was nothing here to argue about. It was an open-and-shut case. Article 58-8, terrorism, ten years.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“Armor-piercing shells for iron-heads have not yet been invented! In arguing with them, you wear yourself out, unless you accept in advance that the argument is simply a game, a jolly pastime.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper, to pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“Libertarian communism is a communism that rejects determinism and fatalism, which gives space to individual will, intuition, imagination, the rapidity of reflexes, the profound instinct of the large masses, who are wiser at moments of crisis than the reasonings of the "elite," who believe in the element of surprise and provocation, in the value of audacity, who do not allow themselves to be encumbered and paralyzed by a weighty, supposedly "scientific" ideological apparatus, who do not prevaricate or bluff, who avoid both adventurism and fear of the unknown.
Libertarian communists have learned from experience how to set about things: they hold in contempt the impotent shambles of disorganization as much as the bureaucratic ball and chain of over-organization.”
― Daniel Guérin, For a Libertarian Communism

“A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith-but only after the act has been committed, and the man com­mitted to the act.”
― Arthur Koestler

“A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own. attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.”
― Joseph Stalin, Collected Works. Volume 5

“And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,�� had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,�� and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

“Similar to how in Nazism 'Jewish Bolshevism' turned out to be the flip side of a 'Jewish plutocracy,' in late Stalinism Jews were subjected to defamation as both radical rightists (counter-revolutionaries) and radical leftists (modernists).”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“У меня была бабушка, она советскую власть не любила. Когда мне было 14 лет, я учился в Запорожском ремесленном училище. И я спросил у бабушки: «А что ты думаешь про Сталина?» Она сказала: «Я думаю, что он бандит». Я очень обрадовался, потому что я тоже так думал, но боялся кому-нибудь сказать. Когда я узнал, что моя бабушка �� единомышленница, это меня порадовало. При этом понимал, что этими мыслями ни с кем, кроме бабушки, делиться нельзя.”
― Владимир Войнович

“Когда люди живут в таких обстоятельствах, когда происходят ужасные вещи на их глазах, многие закрывают глаза и не хотят ничего знать, видеть. Потому что знать, видеть и понимать �� это очень опасно. Многие рассуждали так: если я буду это знать, об этом думать, я начну об этом говорить. Тогда со мной самим что-то случится, я никому ничем не помогу, поэтому я не буду знать и не буду думать, пока меня это не коснулось. И сейчас так тоже многие думают.”
― Владимир Войнович

“What we have is not a direct comparison of workers�� performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short- circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. (...) What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Guérin's leftist, class-based critique of Jacobinism thus had three related implications for contemporary debates about political tactics and strategy. First, it implied a rejection of "class collaboration" and therefore of any type of alliance with the bourgeois Left (Popular Frontism). Second, it implied that the revolutionary movement should be uncompromising, that it should push for more radical social change and not stop halfway (which, as Saint Just famously remarked, was to dig one's own grave), rejecting the Stalinist emphasis on the unavoidability of separate historical "stages" in the long-term revolutionary process. Third, it implied a rejection both of the Leninist model of a centralised, hierarchical party dominating the labour movement and of the "substitutism" (substitution of the party for the proletariat) which had come to characterize the Bolshevik dictatorship.”
― David Berry, For a Libertarian Communism

“কেবল বাচ্চাদে�� বই পড়তে হবে।
কেবল বাচ্চাদে�� বই পড়তে হব��,
কেবল শিশুদে�� জিনি�� ভালোবাসত�� হব��,
বড়োদের সবকিছু ছুঁড়�� ফেলে দিতে হব��
দুঃখ�� চেহারা নিয়ে উঠ�� দাঁড়াবার পর ��
জীবন নিয়ে আম�� অবসাদে মর�� যাচ্ছি
এত�� এম�� কিছু নে�� যা আম�� চা��,
আর কোনো সুললিত জগ�� নে�� ��
কাঠে�� এক মামুলি দোলন�� ;
অন্ধকা��, উঁচু দেবদার�� গাছে��,
অনেক দূরে�� বাগানে, দুলছ�� ;
যা মন�� রেখেছে জ্বর�� আক্রান্ত রক্ত ��”
― Osip Mandelstam, Complete poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

“The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

“Wikipedia: Character Assasination

The effect of a character assassination driven by an individual is not equal to that of a state-driven campaign. The state-sponsored destruction of reputations, fostered by political propaganda and cultural mechanisms, can have more far-reaching consequences. One of the earliest signs of a society's compliance to loosening the reins on the perpetration of crimes (and even massacres) with total impunity is when a government favors or directly encourages a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of its adversaries, and the public accepts its allegations without question. The mobilization toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilization of violence in order to annihilate them. Generally, official dehumanization has preceded the physical assault of the victims.

Specific examples include Zersetzung, by the Stasi secret service agency of East Germany, and kompromat in Russia.”
― Wikipedia Contributors

“Nor did Khrushchev make any attempt at a historical or sociological analysis of the Stalinist system. Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a blood-thirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatsoever.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown