Sociologists From Russia

"If there is something that can prevent men from waging the Third World War, it is the fear that the powerful have of finding themselves after the conflict in the situation of madmen parked in their underground bunkers or far away from the ancient centers of culture. We also do not know what the reaction of the surviving population will be towards them. It is likely that she will quickly get rid of them, considering them responsible for the tragedy. (p.169)"

"We must in our assumptions start from this axiom that the war will be global and lasting. All means of annihilation will be implemented, without any restriction. Preparing for real war must not be reduced to intervention and the improvement of a super-weapon. [...]"

"But the Party had declared merciless war on drinking and that’s why those two remarkable party leaders had to confine themselves to the most trivial non-alcoholic drink. Had their fathers and grandfathers lived up to that moment and had they got to know it, they would have regarded it as a betrayal of Russian traditions and a trick by masons and Zionists."

"The members of the commission flew to Partgrad the very next day – it was an unprecendented case in the Soviet Union. During the Brezhnev era, it would have taken a couple of months for all the discussions, after which the commission would have flown for a holiday to the Crimea or Caucasus in a body. And really, why should one fly to a certain Partgrad if everyone knows that all those ‘Lighthouses’ are mere swindle."

"‘More and more centres of population are joining the socialist competition to acquire the name of the place where prince Oleg was stung by a snake and former czarina Maria was strangled.’"

"After the death of Stalin the town was renamed Grazhdansk. But this name didn’t hold out more than a couple of years: then was the town given the name of Khrushchev himself. For a certain period after the deposal of Khrushchev the town didn’t have any name at all."

"When Andropov became First Secretary of Central Committee of CPSU, he ordered the town renamed Partgrad. It’s hard to guess, how long will that name endure."

"The first words of the inhabitats of Partgrad were offensive words."

"On the palace of the Prince, there was a slogan: ‘Long live feudalism – the bright future of the whole humanity!’ The slogan on the first sanctuary read: ‘Forward to the victory of serfdom!’"

"It was prince Igor who decided already many years before Peter the Great to cut an opening to Europe. But as he didn’t know where Europe was, he cut it in a wrong direction, namely to Asia."

"The Stalin Square and Stalin Prospect were renamed Lenin Square and Lenin Prospect. The statue of Stalin was remade into statue of Lenin."

"The oblast head of Church disproved the claim in a party newspaper. At the same time he condemned the president of the US as a warmonger."

"Having taken advantage of the carelessness of the KGB, the true communist ran to Moscow, with the intention of announcing the Western journalists that communism in Partgrad is being built in a wrong way and to begging the Western leaders to exert pressure on Soviet leadership so that the latter would rectify the Soviet communism and he, a true communist would be taken back in the party."

"She is well known as an ardent supporter of whatever the party’s main direction is. She used to be a passionate Brezhnevist. Now she is an even more passionate Gorbachevist."

"Khrushchev’s perestroika ended without any bloodshed. Khrushchev’s companions abandoned their leader in time and turned Brezhnevists."

"They new the old folk wisdom: what has been built might be really crap and therefore it doesn’t make any sense to dig it, for the smell could make the life really impossible. They regarded Gorbachev exactly that kind of a fool, who had broken the rule."

"Gorbachevism, carried out by mediocre but ambitious party bureaucrats, is an attempt not only to outdo the people but also the objective laws of human society."

"The scientific approach uncovers, that Communism does not eliminate the inequality between men, the social injustice, exploitation of man by man and other evils of society – communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils, which become eternal fellow-travelers of communism."

"Perestroika is nothing but a spectacle organized from above."

"Russian society before the revolution was torn between three forces: a disappearing nobility system, embryonic capitalism and a state bureaucracy. The latter was so predominant in our "hole" that the mass of the population hardly noticed the other two. For this reason, the February revolution went unnoticed. p. 36"

"The problem with slavery is not why people are forced to become slaves, but why they allow themselves to be enslaved. p. 67"

"According to a well-established opinion, kolkhozes were invented by Stalinist villains out of purely ideological considerations. Pure nonsense! The idea is not Marxist, it even has nothing to do with classical Marxism. Far from being a fruit of theory, it emerged in practical life as the product of a very real, nothing less than imaginary, communism. Ideology was only a means of justifying a historical evolution. p. 68"

"I believe that to succeed in any sphere of human activity, it is not enough to have the dispositions. Even if we are very talented, if we are not supported by those who are able to recognize and encourage a talent, success is impossible p. 99"

"The thirties were the darkest and at the same time the most optimistic period in Soviet history. p. 99"

"Communist society arose in Russia in full conformity with the laws of evolution and not as a chance exception. The October Revolution simply cleared the way for a trend that had already been present in Russia for centuries. p. 153"

"I have always been surprised that cultured people with important factual data produce, on large-scale social phenomena, conclusions that are insignificant, superficial or distorted to the point of becoming absurd.The conditions of my existence and the relationships I have maintained with those around me have forced me to do the opposite: to formulate vast generalizations based on the observation of a limited number of “small” events. Over time, I discovered that these "little things" are precisely the foundations of the historical process and that, from a social point of view, the apparently grandiose phenomena are only the dross. Dialectical notions like essence and phenomenon, content and form have been very useful to me. p. 195"

"Every war reveals in one way or another the fundamental characteristics of the societies involved in it. p.196"

"“It is not a question,” I said, “of acting as if there existed somewhere a ready-made dialectical logic, which we would only have to identify as such. This science does not exist and the expression “ dialectical logic" has several meanings. The problem must be posed differently. No one questions the fact that there exists a mode of thinking and a dialectical approach to phenomena. In this approach we use forms that logic describes formal. But we also resort to other means which allow us to orient ourselves in a complex, changing and contradictory reality. It is these means, which make dialectical thinking possible, which must be taken as the object of study of logic . And it matters little whether we view this science as a particular dialectical logic or as a branch of formal logic. Incidentally, these modes of thinking have already been studied by John Stuart Mill, to name only him." p. 316"

"This debate forced me to develop my own conception of these aspects of philosophy. I decided to design a discipline which would encompass as an object of study the problems of logic, gnoseology, ontology, methodology, and dialectics as well as other subjects which touch on the general problems of language and knowledge. I considered the name of the said discipline to be secondary. “Philosophy” didn’t fit. […]. Over time, I began to use the term "complex logic" to distinguish what I was doing from what others were doing. p. 317"

"[...] the dialectical method is nothing other than scientific thinking in conditions where, to paraphrase Marx, the methods of experimental and empirical investigation must give way to the force of abstraction, to theoretical postulates and deductions applied to a changing and complex interconnection of relationships and processes. John Stuart Mill had already attempted to describe such a method, but God knows why it was never compared to dialectics p. 323"

"By transforming Marxism into an official ideology, dialectics had no longer been made an instrument of knowledge of complex realities, but a means of stupefication and ideological fraud. p. 324"

"Any attempt to describe the dialectical method as a set of logical techniques (and this was indeed the purpose of my work) was doomed to vilification: Soviet philosophy had established dialectics as a doctrine of the general laws of the universe. p. 324"

"…[the] historical Stalinism (or simply Stalinism) is the form in which communist society was created in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin, his lieutenants and all those who carried out their wishes and acted in accordance with their ideas and directives (the latter can be described as "historical Stalinists". Communist society is not the product of one man's will. It arose in obedience to objective social laws, which revealed themselves through activity of certain individuals, so that the form they took bears the mark of Stalin and the Stalinists. p. 337"

"Any fool can assert himself at the expense of the past.p 339"

"Stalin is not the creator of Russian tragedy, he was only its expression. p. 340"

"The problem is no longer how to build paradise on Earth, but how to live there. p. 424"

"While considering communalism as a universal phenomenon, I emphasized that only communist society was totally governed according to the laws of communality. p 424"

"Thus, the West perceives its own smallness, reflected in the curved mirror of Soviet society, as a grandiose phenomenon p. 598"

"Ideological brainwashing constitutes the essence and foundation of the formation of the Soviet man. […]. As part of ideological training, people learn to “correctly” interpret the phenomena that they are comforted with in their lives. […] This is not a question of stupidity. The ideological man thus trained does not become stupid. rather, it is the opposite effect that takes place. p. 638"

"One of the reasons for the rather low intellectual level of essays which criticize Soviet society and denounce its scourges is precisely poor ideological education. p. 638"

"In reality, Orwell did not predict the future post-capitalist society, but simply expressed as no one had done before the West's fear of communism. p. 672"

"Nothing takes root so well in people's minds as misconceptions that become prejudices. Ignorance is strength ! p. 673"

"A new type of hurricane of disinformation has been unleashed on humanity. It is no longer a question of the intentional creation and dissemination of deliberately false information to mislead. Now, true information is being used for the supposed purpose of mind cleansing. But this information is selected, processed, combined, interpreted and presented in such a way that a false and distorted picture of reality results. p. 695"

"Never in the history of humanity has such an enormous amount of truth served as material for such a gigantic lie. Never before has humanity fallen into such great error based on the best information available. Today, education and skill serve to stupefy the masses as much as ignorance did in times past."

"The truth is now the lot of the loner with, unfortunately, very limited means of disseminating their ideas and influencing the masses. p. 695"

"… the media lie, having monopolized moral assessments, takes the form of good while attempts to reveal it take the form of evil. Distraught demagogues manipulate the masses by promising them all kinds of earthly good, without taking into consideration the laws of history. p. 696"

"The propaganda apparatus of Stalin and Brezhnev seems, in comparison [to the media lie], a game of amateur forgers. p. 695"

"The world once again finds itself faced with crazy temptations and crazy seductions. […] Be afraid of those who seduce you because seducers always deceive! p. 696"

"(…) I disagree with the commonly accepted opinion that real communism would be the realization of Marxist ideals and that it would be imposed on the masses, against their will, their desires and their interests, by a handful of people. ideologues resorting to force and lies. Communism is not only a political regime that can be transformed by an order from above, it is a social organization of the population. A Soviet Union was formed, not in accordance with the Marxist project nor at the whim of Marxist ideologues, but by virtue of the objective laws which govern the organization of a large mass of population into a completed social organism. It is the result of a historical creative process in which millions of people took part. (…) p. 13"

"Communism arises in various ways. In Russia, it was the result of the crash following the First World War, the revolution and the civil war. It was brought to Eastern European countries by the Soviet army, victorious over Nazi Germany. But whatever the diversity of historical paths it takes in this or that corner of the planet, communism has this particularity in that it is not born from nothing and is not completely foreign to the country where it is established. (…) p. 14-16"