Antony Beevor Quotes

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'

I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

No nation, no country has lived through such hardship and bloodshed as befell the Russian people.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Stalin's methods did not help.

The Russian Bolsheviks sold out most of the hopes of us early communists. The standard of living increased, and education and medicine improved finally after the 1917 Revolution, but the Russians today have as little freedom as we had under the Czar. That is the tragedy of Russia.

Nothing can excuse the cruelties of Communist Russia, though in the East torture does not provoke revolt as it would in the West.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

I suppose anyone who calls a dictator a dictator is 'dangerous' and 'imbalanced.'

We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.

Free speech isn't dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

In the event of a victory over Germany by Soviet Russia and England, Bolshevism in Europe would inevitably follow. Under these circumstances I would prefer to see Germany win the war.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.