Czar Quotes

… preposterous little czar

Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar - and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else.

I was a Stalinist in the '30s. I had come from a Russian revolutionary family who simply were elated by the fact that the Czar was overthrown by this group known as the Bolsheviks. My family identified with anybody who overthrew the Czar. So they identified themselves intuitively with Bolshevism.

These servants of the mighty czar are a lazy, over-bearing, cruel lot of vagabonds, who treat the outcast with the same scorn and severity they themselves receive from their superiors. It is their duty to bring so many heads alive to designated places and to account for the lost as being dead. Before leaving a poor wretch on the way, the officer in charge assures himself of the utter uselessness of attempting to take the worn-out prisoner farther. Only when absolutely beyond human aid is she or he left to the mercy of the fierce and hungry wolves

Russian elites believe that he [President Vladimir Putin] serves the same function as the Czars of old, keeping diverse political clans and their leaders (the boyars) in balance, preventing the civil war or chaos that a country of Russia’s vast size and relative emptiness would face if it were left open to competition by those who retain loyal militias.

In every political community there must be one supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled, authority.

the White Czar of Congress.

President Putin will run again in the 2018 election. He wants to be the czar of this new Russian empire that he is rebuilding. I think he is really obsessed with the idea.

Russia started the war [WWI] with 5,000 guns and reserves of 5 million shells. By the end of 1914, the Czar’s factories were producing 35,000 rounds a month, but the armies at the front were sometimes using 45,000 shells a day.

This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia.

We recognized the imperial government of Russia, but when Russia secures a democratic government we have so far not recognized it.

When my husband and I had to escape from Czarist Russia with a price on our head [in 1905], we had utopian dreams of what Russia might become under a communist government with the Czar deposed but never really thought we would live to see it. But I did live to see my utopian dream come to reality. But it was not Russia. It is America, here and now. There is not a single thing that we revolutionists hoped for, that has not come to pass in America—the greatest country in human history.

Of course we were communists. The Czar’s Secret Police and the newspapers said anyone who was against the Czar was a communist. So we were. Most of us revolutionaries in the early 1900s were young and had little idea of who Karl Marx was, much less his historical and economic theories. Communists wanted the people to be free and control the government and not the Czar. Today we call that democracy. Communism became something else in Russia..

His Imperial Highness, the Czar of All the Russias, has issued a manifesto in favor of universal disarmament …. whatever seriousness there is in his latest pronouncement may be translated into an appeal to his brother despots throughout Europe to cease warring with each other in order that their hands may be free to throttle the infant liberty in their own dominions.