Russia and me - bibliography

Manuscripts don't burn

It's swinish, all this peasant foolery," he murmured, moving away; "it's the games they play when it's light all night in summer."

Why Siberia? Never mind, Siberia if you like. I don't care...we'll work...there's snow in Siberia...I love driving in the snow...and must have bells...

As for the circus, it had a regular troupe and was visited by traveling groups, but performances of so-called French wrestling (scripted wrestling) were more likely to draw large audiences. One newspaper satire published in 1936 ruminated over the question "Where to go in one's spare time? To a film? A drama? A lecture on Abyssinia?" The answer came quickly: "to the circus to watch French wrestling, and argue if it's real or not."

About Magnitogorsk May Day parade:
In 1936, some sixty thousand people were said to have turned out, either to march or watch. Among the slogans displayed that year were "Thank You Comrade Stalin for a Happy Life" and "Life Has Become Merrier."

"Satan has asked and obtained from God our bright shining Russia that he might purple it with martyrs' blood."

17th century Archpriest Avvakum

Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953. He once said that those revolutionaries who refused to use terror as a political tool were "vegetarians."

For the reporters, it was still considered slightly important who chatted with whom, who wore a fedora, who a homburg, and, above all, who was missing. This was called "Soviet watching." At least for me, the ritual lost its aura with the discovery that underneath the mausoleum there was a laboratory charged with monitoring the temperature and rate of deterioration of "the living Lenin." Below that, there was a gymnasium where the guards could work out on off hours. The idea of some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts in the bowels of sacred territory somehow erased all mystery from the grand procession and the leaders who watched it.

"I don't believe in happiness during transition periods," said Maria. "We will work together. We will see life. We will fight. That is enough."

The soldier hands me back my paper. We are cold. We are both dressed in the same rough gray cloth which looks so much like the Russian soil. We are the dictatorship of the proletariat.

*  *  *

"You've got a child's brain in an athlete's skull, Egor. 'Believe' is an old word, Egor. I know. I know that man will be free on a free earth. I know that we will be killed long before that. I know that we will be forgotten. I know that the future will be magnificent. I know it's time to begin."

*  *  *

"If the human species," Kukin went on, "could achieve a collective sensibility for five minutes, it would either be cured or drop dead on the spot."

There'd been times when they'd gone around all winter without any felt boots at all, times when they hadn't even seen ordinary boots but only shoes made of birch bark or shoes of the "Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory model" (that is, made of strips of tires that left the marks of the tread behind them).

Next day I told my workmates what had happened (besotted Ivan prefers vodka to work and has resigned to avoid dismissal). They were a good bunch, none of them careerists or back stabbers, and we decided to pack the next trade union meeting to plead Ivan's case. It was forbidden to dismiss someone without the approval of their union and unions had to have the agreement of their members.

It is not true that people only work for money. If someone is paid to dig a hole every day and fill it in again, he might work for a while but in the end he will rebel; that is why seventy years of communism produced 200 million thieves and drunkards.

Serge's testament is that of an authentic revolutionary whose life was devoted to the belief that socialism without liberty and democracy is not and cannot be socialism.

While Stalin held the political superstructure in a choke-hold, he unleashed his forced collectivization and the five-year plan. His policies created a system, flowing from the logic of socialism in one country, which the Left Opposition opposed at every turn. Stalin's system was characterized by a nationalist foreign policy, a centralized 'plan', vast corruption, an elaborate hierarchy, and atomization of the overworked and undernourished workforce. The system was rigidly controlled from the centre and maintained by terror.

Quoting Serge:
The management of the enterprises is in the hands of communists who merely carry out the instructions of the central organisms. Do these instructions prove to be inexecutable? Do they have unforeseen and vexatious consequences? Do low wages adversely affect the productivity of labour? Has the plan been discredited? Finally has the engineer permitted himself to formulate objections? Did he keep still, out of prudent complacency, on the eve of an experiment that turned out badly? In all these cases and in many others, the technical personnel, accused of incompetence, of negligence, of bad faith, even of the counter-revolutionary spirit or of conspiracy, is the object of mass punishments which always mean arrests and all too often end in executions.