Quotes from the Education of Lev Navrozoc

Below are some favorite quotations from The Education of Lev Navrozov

Czechoslovakia, twelve years after Hungary.  The time in Russia is clocked by her western periphery.

The pre-1917 generation surviving into the thirties was as defenseless as an old strain of microbes against a new antibiotic. 

"Let us live.  Everyone is unhappy.  Before 1953 everyone was happy. Then it became safe to be unhappy, and everyone became unhappy."

"These are not quite freedoms.  Rather leniencies.

"So many people are innocent, historically.  They are happy. They live.  Tell them you live in the Golden Horde.  They will not even understand."

"For every paranoia there is a superparanoia."

There were no Sundays at that time because Sunday in Russian means Resurrection.  So there were days off instead...

"We could live anywhere I liked, he said.  Except of course, Russia, impossible to settle in, and we laughed at the horror of Russia.  He was a comic figure from a comic country."

Why is it that in only in retrospect that life looks like life, and when you are within it, you can notice it no more than you can a cloud when you are within that cloud? 

In 1921 capitalism, that worse evil on earth for the elimination of which almost anything had to be endured, was invited to save the country, and the worst evil on earth did save it...

"But then everything was the state."
The state.  Masterdom.  What a word in Russian:  the adjective has fifteen letters--the very word is leviathan, its scales dully glimmering as it uncoils its five crustaceous syllables.

With the chief of the organs of state security Beria it was different:  the whole organ was his harem. 

The friend was a phony.  But communism is so theatrical, contradictory, and deceptive that it is hard for a communist to detect phoniness in a friend.

Yet the retreat was over in 1928, the society began to be rewarded, supplied, and inspected from the center, and hence the farther off the center, the more pauperized, lawless, and savage life became.

Nikolay Nikolayevich was included to suicide.  I do not say he had a suicidal mania, because he might have thought that it was trying to live that was a mania. 

Living space has influenced all social relations, and there have been marriages of living space, living-space crimes, and struggles for inches of living space more fierce perhaps than for multi-billion fortunes, chains of casinos, or colonies promising gold, ivory and spaces.

"You not-yet-knifed bourjuy"

When grain was taken away from them entirely free, it was called procurement, grain-procurement, or grain-proc for short.

Now there were no bed sheets at all.  We slept on rustling desk paper, but everyone who enters a greater degree of unfreedom in an infinite series of degrees of unfreedom must realize at once that he is in a new life, and no comparison with his former life is possible.

Unheard-of luck it was,  because I was not born under Sagitarius, the archer--I was born under the organization of the country's first machine and tractor station on the shevchenko state farm, odessa region.

When Ulyanov-Lenin still lived in Smolny of Petrograd-Petersburg, he wanted to start the elevator there.  But no stupendous exertion of his dialectical intellect could start it.  Evidently to create a new society and a new man is easier than to start an elevator.

By virtue of his rank, Ulyanov-Lenin was the highest incarnation of self-sacrifice.

After 1917 the populace was his property. 

There were portraits of great Lenin everywhere, but was this enough considering the greatness of his modesty?

The county unit of fewer than a million deaths simply ceased to exist after 1917. 

Not to write, but just to say something which one was not authorized to say was now a crime.

Torture was mentioned officially quite sparingly, while shooting was a good, pleasant, romantic word...

Lev Navrozov's The Education of Lev Navrozov

Russia has suffered experience despotic government for many generations. The upshot of this has been the effect despotism has had on moral thinking.  Just as many American slave owners used their intimacy with tyranny to formulate powerful theories of freedom, so too have many Russians used their familiarity with oppression to articulate clear definitions of moral liberty.  Custine, Herzen, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Nadezhda Mandelstam, are just a few of the Russia thinkers who helped Europe and the world at large to think more deeply about what a society should do to afford its members enjoy personal liberty of conscience.

Another often overlooked Russian moral thinker was Lev Navrozov, whose brilliant social critique of Soviet Russia is entitled The Education of Lev Navrozov.  In this book, Navrozov, the translator, intellectual, and Russian exile, systematically attacks almost every aspect of the Soviet system, including its history, leadership, culture, and guiding political and economic theory.  The book is a skillfully (even beautifully) written polemic masquerading as a memoir.  Its satire is both biting and darkly comic.  Often, his extended rants about particular aspects of Soviet society seem like William Burroughs' famously outrageous "routines" about American society, such as "Thankgiving" prose poem about the place genocide occupies in our country's founding myths.

Navrozov analysis of Russia is a pleasure to read.  With his unmitigated confidence, and deep familiarity with elite Russian political and cultural society, he is perfectly positioned to wound or kill every single sacred cow of communist life.  He asks us to believe, for instance, that the Soviet Union was least friendly to the very people it was allegedly created to help:  the workers.  Navrozov takes Soviet Russia to task on every level.  Starting with Lenin, Navrozov has absolutely no sympathy for any aspect of Soviet society, which he perceives as uniformly hypocritical, inefficient, unequal, and oppressive.  He attacks Soviet policies toward national minorities, antisemitism, food requisitions, policies that induced famine, inequality, attacks on Czechoslovakia and Poland, the gulag system, the absence of democratic processes, the use of torture and capital punishment in the criminal justice system, show trials, propaganda, the absence of a free press, housing shortages, the extraordinary powers of the secret police, the banning of allegedly subversive books, regulations that made employment tardiness a crime, the diminished aesthetics of Socialist Realism, and much, much more.

It is, of course, possible to argue that Navrozov overstates his case by asking us to believe that Lenin was only concerned with his own personal power.  However, he backs up even his least provable claims with logical assertions and a mountain of evidence.  Navrozov is perhaps the Soviet Union's most effective critic insofar as he avoids limiting his criticism to Stalin's purges, and other well-documented episodes of murder and mayhem.  For Navrozov attacks the problem at his roots, arguing against even Marx's suppositions, and insisting that Stalin was chosen over Trotsky and Bukharin precisely because his colleagues perceived him to be the least likely to kill them.  In other words, Navrozov not only denies that the Soviet Union suffered because it failed to honor Lenin's legacy.  He argues that the Soviet Union might have been even worse if Lenin had lived.  The theory cannot, of course, be proven.  However, by the time one finishes The Education of Lev Navrozov this unusual counterfactual history seems as plausible as any other one is likely to encounter.  Even more importantly, by the time one finished this book one has a new vocabulary for explaining Soviet oppression, and terms like "possession-power," "superparanoia," "superlandlords," "caste serfdom," "pseudo-tsar-god," "torture-death station" "mega-scale agent provocateurs," and "nascent global gangsters" makes sense.