Amor Towles Quotes

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.'

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed.

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 real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

What is the secret of Stalin's unquestioned strength? He controls every wheel and screw of the party machine, which is the source of authority and power in the Soviet Union.

No one has murdered more communists than the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin

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

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.

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

Communism in Cuba will collapse sooner or later because you can't control the free flow of information. Communism prevents organizations from developing by stopping the flow of information. The system is based on police and listening devices and triggers the worst characteristics in humans.

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

Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime.

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.

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

Trotsky appeared later and after assembling Foreign Office force, announced himself Minister for Foreign Affairs whereupon entire force declined to serve and left department which is now closed, not even responding to telephone calls. Only department responding to telephone is Ways of Communication but Minister of Ways of Communication imprisoned.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny