Serhii Plokhy: Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

Altogether, 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. All that was required for such catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than 5 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.



The Soviets had to choose whether to show Blix the toilet facilities and hide the super-secret radar or vice versa.

Antony Beevor: Stalingrad

The army’s exact losses are still uncertain, but there was no doubt that the Stalingrad campaign represented the most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history.

Keith Gessen: A Terrible Country

Mikael Bulgakov: Morphine

I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.

China Mieville: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

One must always try to be as radical as reality itself. - Lenin


The position of the Bolsheviks I understood, because they preached 'Down with the war and immediate peace at any price,' but I couldn't understand at all the tactics of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who first broke up the army, as if to avoid counterrevolution, and at the same time desired the continuation of the war to a victorious end. - General Brusilov

M. Ageyev: Novel with Cocaine

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.


And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel


To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.

Ludmila Ulitskaya: The Big Green Tent

Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul.


For some reason this metamorphosis didn’t occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians—when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature.

Andrei Bitov: Pushkin House

Unreality is a condition of life.


"...But what am I getting at? Why don't you hate the fact that we were forced to grab hold of the same log, the fact that we were cast up on the same island, berthed on the same ship! Why hate me in place of everyone? Here, here!" Mitishatyev jumped up. "These walls here, this banality, these dead men! Whom we, the living, exploit! This age, which forces us to know everything about each other! Because we do know everything! We know so terribly much about each other that--never mind hatred, I can't see why we didn't kill each other, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago! We live on each other, we go to the same latrine, gobble the same corpse of Russian literature and take away the taste of it with the same fixed dinner menu, we use the same monthly ticket to ride the same bus to the same apartment and watch the same TV, drink the same vodka, and use the same newspaper to wrap our solitary herring! Why do you put up with all this, and not with poor little me?"

Victor Pelevin: Babylon

In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia.

How can non-existence get sick of itself?


Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.

Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921 - 1929

There it sinks into a coma between two thin stretches of woods. Day after day passes. More and more empty tins are lying by the side of the train. Crows and magpies gather for the feast in larger and larger flocks. Wasteland ... solitude ... the fox has laid his stealthy tracks to the very train. The engine, one carriage hitched to it, makes daily trips to a larger station to fetch our midday meal and newspapers. Influenza has invaded our compartments. We re-read Anatole France and Klyuchevsky's History .... The cold is 53 degrees below zero. Our engine keeps rolling back and forth . . . to avoid freezing . . . we do not even know where we are.


From this train, through the darkness of night, Trotsky saw Russia for the last time. The train ran through the streets and the harbour of Odessa, the city of his childhood and his first ambitions and dreams of the world. In his memories there always stood out the old Tsarist governor of Odessa who had exercised 'absolute power with an uncurbed temper' and who 'standing in his carriage, fully erect, shouted curses in his hoarse voice across the street, shaking his fist'. Another cursing and hoarse voice and another shaking fist--or was it the same?-now pursued the man in his fiftieth year through the streets of his childhood. Once the sight of the satrap made him shrink, 'adjust the school bag and hurry home'. Now the prison-train hurried through the harbour where he was to embark on a boat which would take him to the unknown; and he could only reflect on the incongruity of his fate.

David King: Russian Revolutionary Posters

Vladimir Sorokin: The Blizzard

Crouper brushed off the snow with his mitten: Glass sparkled. He cleaned the snow off the object. It turned out to be a large, three-bucket, green glass bottle set in a basket holder.

‘So that’s it, yur ’onor. . . .’ Crouper cleared the snow from the enormous bottleneck, and sniffed it. ‘Vodka!’

He kicked the crust of ice on the bottle, knocked it off, and turned it over. Not a drop came out.

‘Drunk up the whole thing, he did,’ Crouper concluded reproachfully.

‘He drank it,’ the doctor agreed, ‘and gave up the ghost right on the road. There you have it, good old Russian stupidity.’ 

Venedikt Erokeev: Moscow to the End of the Line

Oh, that most helpless and shameful of times in the life of my people, the time from dawn until the liquor stores open up!


Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn't get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed.


I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride. You can imagine what eyes are like (in the capitalist world). ...such eyes look at you with distrust, reflecting constant worry and torment. That's what they're like in the land of ready cash. How different from the eyes of my people! Their steady stare is completely devoid of all tension. They harbor no thought - but what power! What spiritual power! Such eyes would not sell you. They couldn't sell anything or buy anything. You could spit in the eyes, and they’d call it God's (divine) dew...


And toward the evening of the same day, all the world's teletypes received a communication: "Death was a result of natural causes." It wasn't said whose death, but the world surmised.


I've always been in two minds about women, really. On the one hand, I always liked the fact they had waists, and we hadn't. That aroused in me a feeling of - how shall I put it? - well, pleasure. Yes, pleasurable feelings. Still, on the other hand, they did stab Marat with a penknife, and Marat was Incorruptible, so they shouldn't have stabbed him. That fairly killed off the pleasure. Then again, like Karl Marx, I've always loved women for their little weaknesses - i.e. they've got to sit down to pee, and I've always liked that - that's always filled me with - well, what the hell - a sort of warm feeling. Yes, pleasurable warmth. But then again they did shoot at Lenin, with a revolver no less! And that put a damper on the pleasure as well. I mean, fair enough, sitting down to pee, but shooting at Lenin? That's a sick joke, talking about pleasure after that. However, I digress.


Man should not be lonely – that’s my opinion. Man should give of himself to people, even if they don’t want to take. But if he is lonely anyway, he should go through the cars. He should find people and tell them: ‘Look. I’m lonely, I’ll give of myself to the last drop (because I just drank up the last drop, ha-ha!) and you give of yourselves to me and, having given, tell me where are we going. From Moscow to Petushki or from Petushki to Moscow?

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.


I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.


And the greatest tragedy of our age is we don't listen to our consciences. We don't say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.


There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.


There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.


Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.


When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out. The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.


He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.


And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.


A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil stove; she would give years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour...


Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.


He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.

Architekturzentrum Wien Az W: Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown History

Olga Grushin: The Dream Life of Sukhanov

In anyone's life there can be only a few such moments - moments when a long, ringing hush fills your hearing, the world stands still as if under a magic spell, and thoughts and feelings course freely through your being, traversing the whole of eternity in the duration of a minute, so that when time resumes and you return from whatever nameless, dazzling void you briefly inhabited, you find yourself changed, changed irrevocably, and from then on, whether you want it or not, your life flows in a different direction. This was such a moment for me.


... this stray little thought released in him some echo of the past, a solitary trembling note whose sound rose higher and higher in his chest, awakening inarticulate longings and, inseparable from them, a piercing, unfamiliar sorrow.

Andrei Platonov: Soul

Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable -why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?


Everything in the existing world seemed strange to him; it was as if the world had been created for some brief, mocking game. But this game of make-believe had dragged on for a long time,for eternity, and nobody felt like laughing anymore.

Emmanuel Carrere: Limonov

“Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn’t miss it has no heart.” - Putin


That same year the same Yakovlev explained on television that the decree rehabilitating all those who had been persecuted since 1917 was not at all a measure of clemency, as people in the Party were saying, but of repentance: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes.” In short, there was a sudden consensus that for the last seventy years the country had been in the hands of a gang of criminals.


He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But … I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that’s happened since the end of the second world war.


He walks home along Madison Avenue looking at the passers-by, above all the men, and judging them. Better than me? Worse? Most are better dressed: this is a rich part of town. A lot of them are taller. Some are more handsome. But he alone has the hard, determined look of someone who’s able to kill. And all of them, when they happen to make eye contact, look away in fright.

Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.


Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.


The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.


The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.


By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.

Vladimir Sorokin: The Ice Trilogy

“My father, Sebastian Wolf, was one of the better-known members of the Brotherhood. And we lived with him. One fine day he decided to hammer me. And my sister as well. She perished, and I survived. Before this he had used us as obligatory decorations. And Mama as well. But she died earlier.”

“But . . . how old were you when you were hammered?”

“Seventeen.” Olga stared at the piece of fish on her fork. She picked it up and lifted it to her mouth. and once again dropped it on her tray. “I don’t feel like eating.”