Alexander Zinoviev

"[...] literature plays a sort of ideological role; it instills in men perspectives of humanity. p. 132"

"There is a sociological law according to which systems which have contact end up looking alike... p. 138 and 144"

"I am not for any ideology, I am for Man, for the Human being with a capital H, I am neither for socialism, nor for communism, nor for capitalism... . 142"

"The dissident movement in Russia, despite everything, remains compliant with the regime. It is a diet product. For my part, I stay outside of this whole society. I don't fight any diet. p. 143"

"I address every man, my writings seek to reach what is human in every living being. p. 143"

"The S-F is a very powerful, very modern tool, [...]. p. 143"

"You probably know that, in my books, many characters - to make the possible happen - fight against the impossible. But if we gather 100,000 people, if we lock them in an enclosure, if we let them live there for a year while feeding them normally, I can guarantee you that I know in advance what will happen from here there. I can write it down for you somewhere, in a small envelope that we will open in a year, in order to check if I was wrong. Because such experiences are innumerable: every time you try to organize a very large mass of people, the methods of organization are always and everywhere the same. And a year from now, when you find these people locked up, you will find subordinates, superiors, you will find inequality, you will find a mafia and a small local “KGB”."

"Furthermore, if people seek power, it is not for power per se, but for the material advantages that their position and influence could provide them. p. 42"

"Communist society is a veritable paradise for parasites. p. 42"

"I must insist on the fact that communist society does not only have negative aspects. I would even say that its positive aspects are absolutely fundamental and that the negative points result directly from them. p. 48"

"Others question the real facts and make mistakes. For my part, I am ignorant of this side of reality and I am hardly wrong. There are several ways to find the truth of things: for me, it's always in my head and in my heart."

"The disease of our time is mediocrity."

"A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power."

"After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, a massive attack on the social rights of citizens was launched in the West. Today the socialists who are in power in most European countries are pursuing policies of dismantling the social security system, destroying everything that was socialist in the capitalist countries. There is no longer a political force in the West capable of protecting ordinary citizens. The existence of political parties is a mere formality. They will differ less and less as time goes on. The war in the Balkans was anything but democratic. Nevertheless, the war was perpetrated by the socialists who historically have been against these kinds of ventures. Environmentalists, who are in power in some countries, welcomed the environmental catastrophe caused by the NATO bombings. They even dared to claim that bombs containing depleted uranium are not dangerous for the environment, even though soldiers loading them wear special protective overalls. Thus, democracy is gradually disappearing from the social structure of the West. Totalitarianism is spreading everywhere because the supranational structure imposes its laws on individual states. This undemocratic superstructure gives orders, imposes sanctions, organizes embargos, drops bombs, causes hunger. Even Clinton obeys it. Financial totalitarianism has subjugated political power. Emotions and compassion are alien to cold financial totalitarianism. Compared with financial dictatorship, political dictatorship is humane. Resistance was possible inside the most brutal dictatorships. Rebellion against banks is impossible."

"Although Russia was the first victim of the global Americanisation, one should realise, that the whole Western Europe is affected. The liberal democracy belongs to the past. So does classical Capitalism. We are already situated in a post-democratic era: The new ruling class has realised that one cannot solve the problems of mankind through democracy."

"I discovered a law of social organization that I call the “law of social regeneration” and which can be stated as follows: when a social system collapses, but the men and the political framework remain unchanged, the new social system resembles the one that has just disappeared. Under this law, many elements of Sovietism were preserved or regenerated."

"Western societies were not born in a day. They were formed over the centuries, at the cost of devastating wars, fierce social struggles and enormous human sacrifices. Western values did not come from nowhere either: they are based on religious and philosophical doctrines which are not universal and which therefore cannot be applied to just anyone at any time. What's more, it is not the real Western model that has been implemented here, but its propaganda version."

"the mathematical modeling of social phenomena only makes sense and can only give a positive result under one condition: if the modelers have at their disposal a scientific theory of the objects modeled. The model is not a theory, the model is only one of the means."

"the model gives good and solid results, provided there is a scientific theory."

"And people will be mislead in such a way that they will chew what they are given and be satisfied. You see, with modern means of manipulation, manipulative people can do anything. Not to mention medical means. They'll just make and give pills, injections, and any number of people - any number of people can be made into anything."

"It is the characteristic of totalitarian systems to understand nothing about humor."

"Communism was an ideal for me. But above all an education system: […]. I was therefore educated and raised as an idealist communist, in the sense that Thomas More, Campanella, Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon understood it, who mean a lot to me. But this communism was perverted and betrayed by the leaders of the Party. The reality I observed did not correspond at all to the ideals of communism."

"F.B._ What is your relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A.Z. _ I've never had one and I don't want to have one. As a writer, his "work" is mediocre, overvalued. And as a thinker, it's close to nullity. I am looking to the future, and Solzhenitsyn, to the past."

"The intellectual level of Westerners has never been very high. This is still the case today: you don't have to be intelligent to have power. Westerners create computer models, but they don't have scientific models."

"I argued from the beginning that in the socio-political sphere, Westernism seeks to strengthen the non-democratic aspect of the system of power and administration, to strengthen the role of the state, to introduce non-democratic elements into the system of power and to make democracy a means of manipulating the masses and a camouflage for the totalitarian aspect."

"The effectiveness of the Westernist economy is conditioned by three laws: the rational organization of business; brutal work discipline; maximum use of the means of production and labor force."

"Western society is undemocratic, totalitarian in its very essence - at the level of production cells. And that is why it is democratic in its superstructure, in its ideology. There is a sort of law of constancy of the sum of democracy and totalitarianism."

"...Social laws are immutable. You can destroy a nation, but you cannot destroy the laws by which nations are formed and exist. If the West faces a real threat to its existence, it will not stop at reducing the world's population. I'm pretty sure AIDS, SARS, etc. are all man-made viruses. And I am absolutely certain that in the decades to come, the United States will see China break up into dozens of states. This is all the more inevitable since a billion and a half Chinese are violating the biosociological optimum of humanity."

"Biotechnology is likely to play a role in reducing the world's population, eliminating unwanted peoples, etc. But no matter what we invent, the heart of society will remain the natural man with a human body and a human intellect."

"Communism was so organic for Russia and had so powerfully entered the way of life and psychology of Russians that the destruction of communism was equivalent to the destruction of Russia and of the Russian people as a historic people. [...] In a word, they [the anti-communists] aimed at communism but killed Russia."

"I consider him [i.e Stalin] one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality."

"New knowledge [of] the objects of investigation comes not through observation and experiment (as happens on the empirical level) but through logical judgments in the framework of a given or newly developed theory (i.e., special groups of concepts and statements united by rules of logic)"

"Today, fear of the truth is not a fear of the unknown, but a fear of something we know very well. People are afraid of themselves because they know who they are. p. 302"

"School is not only a preparation of men to receive an education and a specialty. School is a sphere of social life which is subject to the same laws as the whole. It reflects in itself the whole society with all its properties and problems, which only transform in relation to the age and position of citizens. p. 502"

"Marxism emerged not only with the intention of explaining scientifically everything in the world, but in addition to this, as a representative of the ‘hurt and injured’ classes of the world, expressing thus the centuries old dream of an earthly paradise. But dreams and wishes have nothing to do with science."

"All in all, Engels talked so much rot of every kind, that now all the world’s academies of science should be directed to rectify his mistakes and idiocies."

"One physicist writes a study on microphysics, but another writes a book on the importance of Lenin’s and Engels’ works for the development of physics; one mathematician proves theorems, another publishes demagoguery on ingenious mathematical ideas of classical Marxists."

"None of the Marxist concepts (literally – not a single one!) matches the logical rules of scientific concepts."

"The firmest proof that Marxism is not science but an ideology is Marxism’s attitude to the experience of the real communist (or socialist) societies."

"But the [communist] authorities acquire from Marxism a splendid method and abounding phraseology to justify whatever piggery."

"Historically, Marxism was born with the ambition of explaining everything in the world scientifically. It is known, that Marx even dealt with mathematics. Although he could not solve problems which are nowadays clear for even asinine pupils, Marx left behind for the future generations his smart tips."

"Marxism disguises itself as science and owing to this it is easier for Marxism to portray the existing society as acting on the basis of scientific laws of his history, to portray the leadership’s selfishness and idiocy as ingenious scientific foresight etc."

"Unlike science, an ideology is constructed of conventional ambiguous expressions, which require interpretation. It is impossible to verify or experimentally confirm an ideological statement, one cannot refute these for they are meaningless. […] While arising, an ideology may have pretensions to be scientific. But having become an ideology, it loses all the major characteristics of science."

"It is so natural in trying to understand the phenomena of human life to have recourse to notions of historicism that the very fact of wanting to question them seems sacrilegious. Some people think that we can only understand communist society in its essence from a historical point of view, that is to say by considering the history of its formation. Authentic history, that goes without saying, and not the falsified history practiced by pro-communist historians and philosophers. According to them, the course of events, the way in which this society was constituted is sufficient to explain nature. p. 39"

"In the present case, historical judgment furthermore obstructs the scientific understanding of the society that interests us, because the stories here impose functions foreign to this society. p. 40"

"Historical judgment focuses attention on phenomena from which we must above all abstract ourselves if we want to understand what this new society born in a given historical context really is. The historical process is also, of course, a reality, but it is a reality which disappears into the past. The new society which has matured within him quickly got rid of a historical covering which encumbered it and had become foreign to him. It constitutes another historical environment more in keeping with its nature. Sociological reality is designed to remain. She is looking to the future. p. 41"

"Millions of people participated in the historical process that gave birth to the communist society of the Soviet Union. These people have performed billions of different actions. They accomplished them in their own interest. They acted according to the laws of community conduct and not only according to the laws of history, which do not intervene in the conduct of individuals. Some of these actions worked in favor of the new society, the other against. Sometimes the same actions worked either in favor of this society or against it. The supporters of the new societies have not always necessarily acted for it, and conversely its adversaries have not always harmed it. The revolutionaries have done a lot against the revolution and the counter-revolutionaries a lot in its favor, without realizing it. p. 41"

"Historical consciousness is condemned, for its part, to take everything at face value; she sees the origin of communist society in the action of supporters of communist doctrine and links the development of opposing forces to the action of its enemies. She is, for example, incapable of understanding that without the help of representatives of the privileged strata of the old Russian society the new society would not have been able to last a year. p. 41"

"In the present case the man who reasons as a historian is only a petty bourgeois in disguise. p. 42"

"According to my observation, it is above all the fantastic which prevails in S-F, that is to say these absurdities with scientific pretensions which have absolutely nothing in common with science. p.131"