Book Quote by Keith Gessen

The Bolshevik revolution was a counter-revolution. Its first moves were to destroy and eliminate every socialist tendency that had developed in the pre-revolutionary period.…

— Noam Chomsky

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

— John McDonnell

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study…

— Keith Gessen

Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now…

— Richard Lugar

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their…

— Masha Gessen

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Scholars generally understand post-Soviet nostalgia as something more than a simple longing for the return of the Soviet past (Boym 2001; Ivanova 1997; Nadkarni…

— Helena Goscilo

In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under…

— Svetlana Alexievich

“As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet…

— Orlando Figes

“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.”

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“If your case, as a politically repressed person, is reviewed by the Special Council, you are almost guaranteed the standard sentence: ten years in…

— Anonymous