Terror in Jim Pinnel's Saturn's Daughters

"For her, revolution was a patchwork of half-understood ideas, seductive in its promise of unqualified freedom, unlimited horizons, and an escape from her dreary home."

"She's eighteen. A rebel by the sound of her.  But rebellion isn't revolution--she'll learn that one way or the other."
"What's the difference?"
"Discipline, Coalminer.  Discipline is the difference."

"Freedom was doubtless a principle of revolution, but in practice there was something unrevolutionary about the unrestricted exercise of personal liberty."

"Who's going to pay our wages when they are dead?  Don't think about that, do they?"
"I asked him that, and he says, come the revolution, they'll take women in the army."

"Strange, that new girl," Olga remarked, grateful for the help.  "Going off like that with the Hangman.  He gives me the creeps."
"Not so strange really," Anna replied.  "She's a normal, healthy young women--she likes violent men.  Killers, I should think, she finds irresistible."
"What's normal and healthy about that?"
"Well, of course, Popov isn't in uniform like most of our killers."

Thanks to Midas Public Relations for sending me a copy of Jim Pinnell's Saturn's Daughters, a work of historical fiction that examines the origins of modern Russian terrorism.  Pinnell's well-researched novel reminds us that Soviet totalitarianism had its roots in the dialectic of terrorism and tsarist authoritarianism.  Pinnell's account of three women who take up arms against a brutal regime is rich in detail.  Reading Pinnell helps one to understand the philosophical assumptions of the radical intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century.  We get a glimpse of the radicals' reading list, which of course included Hegel, Bakunin, and Chernychevsky.  We also get a glimpse of the way in which an undemocratic government spawned a kind of mirror image of itself in an undemocratic underground opposition.  At first, both parties were, relatively speaking, amateur brutes.  The government was indifferent to the needs of its citizens, especially its workers and peasants, and the intelligentsia, in turn, felt little or no need to sympathize with the sovereign and his aristocratic and clerical supporters.  Over time, the game became much more dangerous, with each side adopting ever more sophisticated modes of surveillance and brutality.

Terry Eagleton examines the broader philosophical underpinnings of this double helix of violence in his treatise on the West's fascination with violence, entitled Holy Terror.  Eagleton offers a somewhat deeper explanation of Soviet totalitarianism than we offer encounter.  Sometimes historians seem to argue that Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and other Soviet leaders developed dangerous habits as a result of their years of conspiracy, and these habits eventually became addictions when when the erstwhile criminals entered into government.  This may be partially true.  Certainly the Old Bolsheviks were hard men with little sympathy for liberalism or what they regarded as the fig leaves of parliamentary democracy and bourgeois civil rights.  Yet that explanation doesn't go far enough.   Eagleton helps us to understand that modern thinkers are attracted to the very essence of terror, an essence they come to crave.  If we acknowledge the unspeakable cruelty and terrifying dimensions of early Soviet brutality, we must also acknowledge that Stalinism was no accident.  Stalin was rather the right man for one of modernity's most important projects:  namely, terror.

Returning to Pinnell, we see three ladies who are enthralled with the whole notion of terror.  One of the three women is new to political violence, and so her awakening is properly compared to a sexual awakening.  In truth, terror isn't ever very far removed from sensuality and sexuality.  If one watches television at all, one understands that almost all modern tele-dramas depend on the intrinsic links between these two cosmic forces.  Pinnell's special contribution to our understanding of the modern cult of violence is to demonstrate that women are often just as attracted to terror as men are.  Pinnell's characters are victims of gender ideology in late nineteenth century Russia, but this doesn't make them immune from the attractions of violence.  One kicks a condemned man in the face, another learns the art of boxing, a third moves to exert power over her disciples.

Terry Eagelton's analysis of terror is far reaching.  He argues that the modern era's interest in terror is linked to its fascination with liberty.  Pairing liberty with terror is even now an uncomfortable proposition.  Why this pairing still seems unnatural is hard to say.  We know that the French Revolution articulated a rationale for unlimited freedom as well as a justification for unlimited violence.

After 1789, Western men and women never gave up on either liberty or terror.  The problem, Eagleton asserts, is that modern notions of liberty are grounded in nothing other than, well, liberty.  In the absence of God, secular philosophy grounds liberty in a philosophical void. Thus liberty is an unruly, immodest, and indeed dangerous proposition.  Indeed, liberty knows no limits.  The paradox of all paradoxes is, of course, that if you look hard enough you realize that a paradox isn't as ironic as it originally appears.  This is the case with liberty and terror.  One may wonder why the Soviet Union, that country which professed to be the freest country the world had ever known, attacked so many of its citizens, depriving them of almost every figment of freedom as we commonly understand the term.  But look again.  If we accept the idea that the Soviet Union was resistant to any constraints on the practice of liberty, we intuitively understand why it simultaneously adopted the practice of terror.  If terror could enforce liberty, who could gainsay it?  The two things weren't so different anyhow.  They were both pure expressions of will, which needed to be unfettered almost by definition.

Kirill Medvedev and the Students of God

Here are just a few snippets from Kirill Medvedev's poetry...

"they should be out catching butterflies"

"hereditary businessman"

"(we all live among losers)"

"children think that in the form they now exist
they will live forever"

"by the way, some, I think, are still having kids out of a sense of doom."

"of everyone who turned out to be a computer genius
of everyone who became an assistant
to editors-in-chief
or a designer
for major fashion magazines"

"of all the historians
the students of god,
those who didn't get into the Financial Academy"

"inside a crowd of human neuroses;
it was
a miasma of anxieties"

"with a group of talented failures"

"Kirill, you should change your method,
it's getting stale."

"hopelessly, feverishly prolific"

"my girlfriend Anissa recently asked me,
'why don't you read any good literature,
why is everything you read such crap?'"

"I've noticed that
many women
are completely unsatisfied with the intelligence of their husbands and lovers."

"we dance around others' misfortunes like mischievous wolves like
some sort of lascivious bats in a frenzy"

"everything happens because of food"


"I thought of how often in my confrontations
with the face
of the society of consumption
sentimentality replaces disgust."

"art is not, in any case, Verlaine and Rimbaud
in a bar in Belgium
most likely, art is a wife who does not share or partake in
your interets, its your young song
an insensitive idiot, cretin"

"sometimes the lack of human interaction can make a person
physically ill
but sometimes human interaction is even worse than that"

"and it wouldn't be the Russian language, which I do whatever
I want with
and which in turn does whatever it wants with me."

"goodness exists if it exists
in some mangled new form,
in awful places,
in cold hellish places,
in wandering, dreaming, unstable
places"

"with the help of their bald fuhrer Lukashenko
is bringing Belarus back to approximately the 6th century
and inventing a language
and that from her eon out the entire nation
is supposed to speak,
the principal goal being to invent words that don't exist"

"the cocksucker mafia that runs America
is gradually conquering the entire world."

"the Chinese who are taking the world block by block"

"we are ourselves turning into a
a great temptation,
like two parted legs"

Budapest Ramblings

A few weeks ago I wrote to say that this blog was officially on hiatus while I waited to hear whether or not I had been readmitted to my old doctoral program in history.  As readers may recall, I have been on "hiatus" from that program for approximately thirteen years.  Needless to say, I was too undisciplined to stay away from Soviet Roulette altogether.  How can I not write something about revolution when I'm visited places like Tunisia and Hungary and France this summer?  Really, I'm addicted to the subject of revolution.  I see it everywhere.  

I'm reminded of one of the great authorities on addiction, Charles Bukowski.  I always liked the way the plots of his novels always revolved around alcohol.  Why does the protagonist get up?  He needs a drink.  Why does he befriend somebody?   He hopes they will have some money for a drink.  Why does he cross the street?  There's a bar there.  In fact, Bukowski's protagonists move through life as if they are being shot from a slingshot from one alcoholic beverage to another.  This is how I feel when it comes to the subject of revolution.  Flying to Tunisia, I'm thinking about the Arab Spring;  boarding a plane for Hungary, I'm wondering about the Hungarian Revolutions of 1956 and 1989;  landing in France, I'm contemplating 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, and 1968.  

Another genius of addiction, Burroughs, also demonstrated how characters are pushed from one plot point to another by cravings.  In Queer, he sits across the table from his love object, and the force of his addiction for intimacy is so strong that, although physically timid, the protagonist's spectral arms are rising up to grasp and fondle the handsome young man in front of him.  Yes, it's neither reason nor chance, but craven addiction, that really explains how and why we move through our lives as we do. 

At any rate, I haven't heard anything at all from my old doctoral program, not even a peep.  I don't blame the faculty who are charged with deciding my fate.  How often are they asked to consider whether or not to readmit somebody who disappeared from their college for well over a decade?  They don't owe me a thing.  

On the other hand, there is a strange correspondence between my slow and subtle exit from the program and my current limbo.  When I left UIUC, I did so gradually, in stages, and without really informing anybody other than my advisor.  As I've said before, it took a year or so before people in the department decided that I no longer had any need for a departmental mailbox.  While I took up teaching jobs at Columbia College and Roosevelt University, I continued to earn my health care by serving as a teaching assistant, which meant driving back to Urbana once a week to teach four discussion sections of an American history class.  Long, horrid commutes have been my lot ever since.  

At any rate, this confused post is meant to update my readers with this simple statement:  I've not learned anything at all, not even after several months.   It's funny:  as a dean at a community college, I ask my faculty to check in with students if they miss even one or two classes.  My wife says the same:  as a professor of engineering, she's told that she should be concerned if any student fails to turn in an assignment.  The Obama Administration has a similar mantra:  make sure people graduate from college.   If you're an undergraduate, educators need to do everything possible to ensure that you'll graduate.  But a doctoral student is different.  When I was at Urbana, they told me that people took, on average, about eight years to graduate.   If this statistic is correct, and anecdotal evidence from friends suggests that it was, then many others took even longer to graduate.

To be honest, I bare almost all of the responsibility for not finishing my doctorate.  I was a well-educated adult who ought to have known better than leave something half-finished, especially in light of my interest in and, yes, talent for, history.  Even so, it's remarkable to think back at my retreat from graduate school.  After earning good grades, passing my preliminary exams, and successfully defending my dissertation proposal, I slid away from graduate school without so much as a conversation with anybody other than my own advisor.  Perhaps another professor or an advisor would have seen things differently?  I suppose my advisor and others had noticed that I had all the signs of burn-out and didn't want to stand in my way.  

I don't say that I made the wrong decision, or that any attempts to dissuade me from leaving would have been helpful to me.  I needed to go.  I needed to find something I couldn't find in the history department.  I'm not sure I can define that thing even now, but it was related to maturity and sexuality and sanity and, somehow, Heidegger, but don't ask me to explain the tie in.  

I sound as if I'm complaining about a school which didn't bother to say goodbye to me, and doesn't bother to welcome me back.  But I think I'm enjoying the silence this time around.  I think I like savoring this period of uncertainty.  You learn a lot from ambiguity.  I'm able to think about the past and future in new ways and I suspect that a "yes" or a "no" will ultimately be good for me if I'm brave enough this time around to embrace either answer.

But back to Russian history, and revolution in general.  Here in Budapest, I'm reading Kirill Medvedev's It's No Good.  Medvedev--no relation to the Russian political leader-is a poet and literary critic and activist.  Without going into the peculiarities of the book's production process, Medvedev argues that the only cure to Russia's present crisis is more Marxism.  It's an ironic prescription to be sure, but one probably worth looking at this far out from 1991.  What Medvedev is saying is that Russia  missed out on the evolution of Western Marxism as a result of the Soviet experience.  In fact, one of the worst things about the Soviet Union is that it killed the intelligentsia's ability to counteract some of the worst trends of modernity, including neoliberalism, postmodern cynicism, unrestrained capitalism, and neofascism.   

It's strange to see that we learn so much about the past by following the present.  Although Medvedev's critique of Russia's intelligentsia is oversimplified, he has a point.  Didn't the Russian intelligentsia fail to oppose the worst abuses of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes precisely because they were still fighting the Soviet Union?  Weren't they unable to evolve in their opposition to tyranny because Soviet communism had immured the country from all other forms of theoretical opposition to capitalism?  It's a complex question but it's no doubt the right time to attempt to answer it.  

Les Miserables

This week I embarked on an overseas trip.  The trip takes me from Chicago to Montreal to Tunis to Budapest to Paris and home again.  It's funny how Russia and its revolution can follow me anywhere.  On the plane, I'm reading Zhivago's Children, about the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, but I also know that I'm landing in a place that only recently sparked the Arab Spring.  In fact, I began dating my current wife when the Tunisian Revolution had just gotten underway. I remember helping her with speech ideas after the fall of the government.  My wife talked about talking to her mother by Skype in code to avoid the prying ears of government officials or spies.

Now that I'm in Tunis, I stay off the subject of revolution, but it's obvious that some Tunisians worry about the aftermath of revolution.  Did revolution change anything?  Are things better or worse than before the revolution?  Did revolution unleash conservative forces that will overturn the progress of women in the country?  Will revolution overthrow all forms of secularism in the country?  The debate about revolution isn't always abstract.  My in-laws claim that the revolution has led to certain forms of social disorder, including random garbage dumps along the beach and "squatter" make-shift homes along the directly behind their home.  My wife says that the revolution engendered the religious prayers that now precede local electrical engineering conferences.

Clearly, Tunisia isn't the place to escape revolution.  Being here reminds me that revolution isn't something that happens every century or so.  In fact, people in all, or almost all countries, are thinking about revolution on some level.  Where there's no possibility of slow, democratic transformations, people are forced to dream about revolution.  You either accept the status quo, or you dream of sudden, dramatic change.

After Tunisia, we're off to Hungary, which of course recently overthrew a communist government, and famously failed to do so in 1956, courtesy of Russian tanks.  After Hungary, we'll stop in Paris, home of Europe's foundational revolution, on the way back to North America.  Paris, more than anywhere else, should remind one of the pervasiveness of revolution.  Or perhaps the Paris leg of my trip would have been more of a vacation from revolutionary themes if I hadn't watched Les Miserables on the plane trip to Tunis?

Russia for Kids

A few weeks ago my son's second grade teacher asked parents if they wanted to visit school to talk about a country they had visited.  Naturally, I decided to embarrass my son by speaking to his class, and two others, about Russia.  Not having taught any subject in several years, it took me some time to prepare my PowerPoint slides for this day.  The problem was made worse by my unfamiliarity with the audience.  What were second graders really interested in?  What level of information could they possibly remember?  Would it be worse for them, or me, if the information was too simplistic or too complex?  My son knows I read about Russia, even think about Russia, all the time.  Once he pretended to be me, and his first act of mimicry was to declare:  "Hi, I'm Dad.  I  love Russian history."  In the end, I put together a series of PowerPoint slides that asked the kids seemingly easy questions that were slightly more complex than they appeared.  Was Russia a cold or a hot country?  Russia is, of course, a cold country, at least compared to most other countries, the U.S. included.  But of course Russians can live in the Crimea or other relatively warm climates.  Was Russia far from the U.S. or close to the U.S.?  Well, it would take several long flights to reach Moscow, and several more to reach Yekaterinburg.  However, as Sarah Palin famously reminded us all, at a distance of only four kilometers, Russia is visible from the Alaskan shoreline.  Is Russia flat or mountainous?  Showing both a picture and a map of the steppe, I went with flat, but showed a picture of Urals to provide some "relief."  

Again and again, I asked students questions with more than one answer.  Is Russia an old country or a new country?  When one student said it was an old country, I gave him a postcard of one of the tsar's palaces to acknowledge the correctness of the answer.  "Yes," I said, "Russia was old.  Russians had been around since the Vikings, if not before."  But when another student said it was a new country, she also got a postcard, for in a sense, the current iteration of Russia only emerged when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  Is Russia a place with a few people or a lot of people?  I explained that Russia was a populous country, but also sparsely populated, extremely so in parts.  

Presenting to about 90 second graders was a wonderful experience on several levels.  But it was also interesting to see how tempting it is to reproduce some negative forms of nationalism.  When I initially began preparing to meet my son's class, I thought I should concentrate on Russia's accomplishments, and in a sense I did.  I gave the class a few reasons why I "loved" Russia.  These included Russia's accomplishments in music, poetry, and space exploration.  But of course pointing to aspects of Russian "greatness" can imply that other countries are "less great," so I went out of my way to mention that all countries are wonderful in their own way.  I also talked about oppositional figures such as Anna Akhmatova, whose contribution to Russia included quiet resistance to tyranny, and Tolstoy, who contributed to Gandhi's understanding of nonviolence, and Martin Luther King's too.  

It seems patently absurd to attempt to give second graders a complex understanding of Russian culture and history.  Better by far to stick to the facts, such as this one:  that the coldest inhabited place on Earth is Russia.  But who can say when people start to develop a monolithic or hegemonic view of culture if we don't at least develop the habits of mind which lead students to think about complexity, diversity, and resistance to power?  Thus, when I mentioned Pushkin, Russia's "Shakespeare," I explained that he his grandfather had been African.  It's never too early to teach kids that Russia, like most countries, is a product of mixing, hybridization, and diversity.  For this reason, I also put a photo of a St. Petersburg mosque right alongside photos of Orthodox churches.  Perhaps it says something that ten children volunteered to define the word, "mosque," before one of them seemed to hit on something that approximated a real answer.   All of the kids who ventured an answer got a Russian postcard, of course, except for one enthusiastic child who, when called upon, merely introduced himself.  

I hope the kids got something from the presentation.  It made me feel good but it also made me laugh at myself.  After studying Russia for years, I couldn't answer some of the kids' basic questions.  How had Russians built their churches?  I used that question to talk about serfdom, not really knowing the extent to which serfs had or had not contributed to the construction of Russia's myriad cathedrals.  What did the colors of the Russian flag stand for?  I had no idea.  Where did the Russian language come from?  Luckily, I wasn't asked to teach the kids anything about the language or food.  I would have failed both tests for sure.  I think the main thing I learned from the presentation is that we approach a subject like Russia from various angles and perspectives, but this approach is never an accident.  This choice reveals something about the presenter, the audience, and the subject.  Had I not paused for a second or two before presenting Russia to the kids, I might very easily have reproduced Putin's version of the subject.  And while the kids might not have suffered from the error, I would have been giving myself the green light to make similar errors to older audiences.

The Dimensions of Revolution

Revolutions are inherently fascinating phenomena.  Unlike some other historical events or processes, revolutions never unfold in one or two discrete realms of human interaction or meaning.  The power and influence of revolutions can't be easily summed up.  Revolutions seem to impact the destinies of humankind out of all proportion to the political or economic change they engender.  How can we describe the principle ways in which revolutions overrun history?  What are they words that conjure up their complexity?  Let's start with some of the obvious ones.

Revolutions are about VIOLENCE.  They are soaked in blood.  I once wrote a post comparing revolutionary violence to true crime novels.  The comparison makes sense to me.  We read good true crime novels not only to explore the darker aspects of the human story, but also to illuminate the banality of everyday life.  When Truman Capote describes a tragic multiple murder, he tells us something about the nature of evil, but also something about the way ordinary farm life operates on the Kansas plains.  Thus revolutions revolutions shed blood, but in doing so they reveal both the dark underpinnings of civic life while paradoxically shedding light on those factors that keep ordinary social life operating.  The violence compels us, but it has a dual effect.  Some members of society reenact the violence, while others spend an equal amount of energy trying to prevent its recurrence, perhaps even at the cost of dictatorship.

Revolutions are about TIME.  It's no accident that revolutionaries spend a great deal of time examining the nature of time.  Revolutionaries set up new calendars and new ceremonies to remind them of temporal rupture.  Revolutionaries are obsessed with the differences that exist "before" and "after" what they regard as a foundational event.  It takes a De Tocqueville to see continuity between an ancien regime and a new millennium.

Revolutions speed up time, launching their participants headlong into the FUTURE, which is of course its own revolutionary keyword.  For nobody supports a revolution if it doesn't promise to put a people into a different grammatical tense.  For whatever reason, modern men and women are unhappy with both the past and the present;  they generally prefer the future.  No matter that the future established by Russian and Chinese revolutionaries was so much worse than the immediate and perhaps even distant pasts.  People who accept revolution (and few ultimately resist its seductive power) ultimately do so in the belief that revolution represents an airline ticket to a promising future.  Without revolution, the future will eventually come, but perhaps the proper analogy would be a bus or train ride.  And who has time for the bus or train these days?  Without revolution, men and women might as well walk to the future.

Revolutions are about ART.  Revolutions have an aesthetic component.  People who accept the logic or revolutions usually want to live more beautifully.  Revolutions are of course the ultimate form of performance art.  When the outbreak of the February Revolution in Russia is described, contemporaries often noted that the great event interrupted an actual theatre-going experience of the bourgeoisie. This isn't an accident.  The two events--an actual theatre performance and revolutionary spectacle--resemble one another.  Revolutionaries are seeking a more elegant even beautiful solution to ugly social problems.  If revolutions weren't related to beauty, mundane reform would probably be enough.  You pass laws to improve conditions, you participate in revolution if you want to create a lovely future.

There are other words that conjure about the mysterious power of revolutions.  Revolutions are WORDY, CHAOTIC, BLOODY.  They produce CHANGE and EXCITEMENT.  They are GLOBAL, relying on an appeal to the whole of humanity in order to justify spectacular carnage and ordinarily unacceptable carnage.

Everyday Evil

Americans often find themselves working in outlandish moral environments.  Even the typical employer can resemble a Darwinian jungle, a place in which humanism seems incongruous and ethical thinking seems irrelevant to daily life.  In corporate life, power isn’t easily constrained.  Business leaders silence dissent and lay off troublemakers whenever senior leaders feel threatened.  Apart from the fragile safeguards of union membership and employment law, corporate leaders acts as savagely as the markets they navigate.  Marxist theorists always said as much.  Even so, Americans often have access to some sort of ethical discourse.  If they are disempowered at work, they at least exercise the right to participate in civic life by voting, attending church, or joining neighborhood organizations.  The typical American will be terrorized at some point in his or her career, but usually not simultaneously in every segment of his or her life.  Thus it is almost impossible to conceive of the Soviet experience in totalitarian terror, in which the Communist Party and the state intruded into almost every dimension of a Soviet subject’s struggle to make a life.  

What does such surveillance feel like?  How does it work?  We have only to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, to understand.  According to the poet’s wife, the Soviet government declared war on the individual, enlisting the active and ongoing support of countless numbers of allies, including bureaucrats, employers, police agents, educators, cultural actors, neighbors, and alleged friends.  The result was victory, at least in the short run.  The individual always lost.  He or she usually surrendered straightaway, but if he or she offered resistance, the result was the same:  destruction. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir is paradoxical of course.  By writing it, she offers some testimony in favor of the long-term violability of individualism, memory, and revisionist history.  But every page of the book makes one feel that odds against the individual are extraordinarily poor.  If the average American sometimes gives up in the face of corporate dishonesty and brutality, how impossible is it to imagine doing battle with the employer when he or she is fully aligned with a unitary government and its myriad agents?  

Below are a few of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s throwaway lines about the unequal contest she wages for decades.  What’s interesting about Hope Against Hope, is the extent to which even this martyr for poetry admits to feeling implicated in the Soviet Union’s ubiquitous system of oppression.  For Nadezhda, the result was this:  that there really was no way to operate “outside” the evil of what Sheila Fitzpatrick called everyday Stalinism. 

“When we met we spoke in whispers, glancing at the walls for fear of eavesdropping neighbors or hidden microphones.”

“And we tried to become adept in Aesopian language.”

“The old Russian proverb that prison or the poorhouse waits for every man has never been more true…”

“It was typical of Elsberg that, after getting his friend S. sent to a concentration camp, he continue to visit S.’s wife and gave her advice.”

“This was the seventeenth year after the creation of our system.”

“Having entered a realm of non-being, I had lost the sense of death.  In the face of doom, even fear disappears.  Fear is a gleam of hope, the will to live, self-assertion.:

“Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot…I decided it is better to scream…Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

“There is a moment of truth when you are overcome by sheer astonishment:  ‘So that’s where I’m living, and the sort of people I’m living with! So this is what they’re capable of!  So this is the world I live in!”

“People are shot everywhere,” the young physicist L. once said to me.  “More so here, you think?  Well, that’s progress.”

“My children love Stalin most of all, and me only second,” Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna, used to say.” 

“All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak.”

“…life can be far more terrible than death, as we have seen in our times.”

“’How much further must we go?’ and [Arch-priest Avvakum] replies:  ‘Until the very grave, woman.’”

“They are going to behead me, as in Peter’s time.”

“In my long life I have often imagined that we had reached the limit and that things would ‘ease off,’ as I put it.  Nobody likes to part with his illusions.”

“There was in his mind a total contrast between ‘ordinary people’ and the sort he had encountered in the Lubianka.”

“Walking around Cherdyn, he would look for [Akhmatova’s] corpse in the ravines.”

“But does one need to be all that hypersensitive to be broken by this life of ours?”

“When I asked them what she was like, they said she was ‘no worse than anybody else.’  There are indeed circumstances in which it is not possible to display high moral qualities.”

“We all act ‘on instructions,’ and there is no sense in closing our eyes to the fact.”

“Bleeding to death is not the worst way of getting out of this life of ours…”

“Magnificent before the defenseless, they are only good at savaging victims already caught in a trap.”

“’You said to So-and-so that you would rather live in Paris than Moscow.’”

“The interrogator’s first question was ‘Why do you think you were arrested?’”

“Public opinion here has always been conditioned to take the side of the strong against the weak.” 

“Why are we supposed to be brave enough to stand up to all the horrors of the twentieth century prisons and camps?  Are we supposed to sing as we fall into the mass graves?”

“Nothing binds people together more than complicity in the same crime…”

“When they rebuked him for being late, B. would say:  ‘I always fall asleep when I’m in trouble.’”

“Because of this system of ‘interviews,’ people developed two kinds of phobia—some suspected that everybody they met was an informer, others that they might be taken for one.”

“This is how we lived, and this is why we are not the same as other people.”

“…was it my fault for not getting rid of all of the friends and acquaintances, as did most good wives and mothers at that time?”

“…in this country all real poetry is outrageous…”

“In that memorable year I had already come to understand one or two things, but it was still not enough.”

“We have all, from top to bottom of society, learned something, even though we have destroyed our culture in the process and reverted to savagery.”

“…the people who were making history in those days had all the cruelty and inconsistency of the children they were.”

“We were set on our fellow men like dogs, and the whole pack of us licked the hunter’s hand, squealing incomprehensibly.”

“’We must create a type of Russian revolutionary woman,’ said Larisa Reisner…’The French Revolution created its own type. We must do the same.’”