112 Quotes About Soviet-union

Stalin scribbled on an intelligence report predicting that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union in June 1941: 'You can send your "source" to his f*cking mother. This is disinformation.

You don't have to be very bright to carry a handbarrow. So the squad leader gave such work to people who'd been in positions of authority.

The days rolled by in the camp—they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.

Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot. If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed.

To outsmart you they thought up work squads—but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where everyone is paid his separate wage. Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You're loafing you bastard—do you think I'm willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob.

You put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.