Czarist Russia Quotes

The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward Tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were often explicitly racist—such as the national origins quotas of the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act—the restrictions were also motivated by bona fide national security concerns, as well as a desire to protect native wages and welfare states from immigrant competition and foreign dependents.

Sistema is a deep-seated facet of the Russian culture that goes beyond politics and ideology, and it will exist long after Puitin's ruke has ended. Sistema combines the idea that the state should enjoy unlimited access to all national resources, public and provate, with a kind of state of emergency in which every level of society --businesses, social and ethnic groups, powerful clans and even criminal gangs--is drafted into solving what the Kremlin labels "Urgent State Problems".

In 1914, there were two countries in the world that required you to have a passport if you wanted to enter - Czarist Russia and the Ottomans. Anywhere else, you could come and go as you pleased.

Mujahedin from around the world have been arriving at the Caucasus area to join with their brethren in the fight of the aggressor occupying forces of the Russian forces who came to subjugate Muslim Caucasia under their Christian Orthodox rule.

Our party has stagnated while working underground.

In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

I got a cable from New York saying that what I'd written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn't make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me.

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.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.