Yuan Tengfei Quotes

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

In Russia, history is often written in pencil so it can be more easily erased.

In 1917, with the Bolsheviks, you had intra-elite conversations about what the country should be doing. You had arguments. Under Stalin, you didn’t really. But then after Stalin, you started having those arguments again.

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

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.

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.

Russia is now a horrible picture with its revolutionary double nature. It lies there like a huge wreck on the shore, broken up by its revolution.

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.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

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

The Russian Leadership Came to the conclusian that Western Expansion could only be reversed with an "iron fist".

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.

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.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

From our perspective now, there is a not a huge understanding about the totalitarian Communism that Soviet Russia practiced during the 1950s - it was an atrocious system.

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.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.

Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it's still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

Sasha, aren’t you a good communist? How can you allow so much ideological freedom? Do something!.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.