Wretched and abundant,
Oppressed and powerful,
Weak and mighty,
Mother Russia!
Nikolai Nekrasov
V.I. Lenin
Father of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik State"Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"
by David Remnick"They think to order all things wisely;
but having rejected Christ they will end
by drenching the world with blood."
Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Brothers Karamazov"Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying not because they are criminals, but because they are like machines that have got out of control, like runaway trains."
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
Red Star Rising:
Soviet Power and the 1917 Russian RevolutionThe Bolsheviks and the beginnings of Commissar culture
"...men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron will,
armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept less."Everywhere there were new elections: for the running of housing, trade, industry and municipal services. Commissars were being appointed to each, men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron will, armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept less. They knew the shrinking bourgeois breed, the average holder of cheap governmental stocks, and they spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act. These were the people who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, and company after company, enterprise after enterprise, became Bolshevised.
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
"This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching.
And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it."
...I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience told you to do. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare, an exceptional event, something quite out of the ordinary. Murders happened in plays, newspapers, and detective stories, not in everyday life. And then there was the jump from this peaceful, naive moderation to blood and tears, to mass insanity, and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter.
I suppose one must always pay for such things. You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration, how everything began to break down at once - trains and food supplies in towns, and the foundations of the family, and moral standards... it was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody's throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.
This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it. Our home, too, became infected. Something went wrong in it. Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation - you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes. How could Pasha, who was so discriminating, so exacting with himself, who distinguished so unerringly between reality and appearance, how could he fail to notice the falsehood that had crept into our lives?
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
"Now It's Happened"
by D.H. Lawrence
One cannot help thinking,
how much better it would have been
if Vronsky and Anna Karenin
had stood up for themselves and seen
Russia across her crisis,
instead of leaving it to Lenin.The big flamboyant Russia
might have been saved, if a pair
of rebels like Anna and Vronsky
had blasted the sickly air
of Dostoevsky and Tchekov,
and spy-government everywhere.But Tolsoi was a traitor
to the Russia that needed him most,
the clumsy, bewildered Russia
so worried by the Holy Ghost,
He shifted his job to the peasants
and landed them all on toast.Dostoevsky, the Judas,
with his sham christianity
epileptically ruined
the last bit of sanity
left in the heft bodies
of the Russian nobility.So our goody-goody men betray us
and our sainty-saints let us down,
and a sickly people will slay us
if we touch the sob-stuff crown
of such martyrs; while Marxian tenets
naturally take hold of the town.Too much of the humbly wet-leg
and the holy can't-help-it touch,
till you've ruined a nation's fibre
and they all loathe feeling as such,
and want to be cold and devilish hard
like machines - and you can't wonder much -
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