Russian Communists

"The Soviet Union is a peaceful country. The people's every goal serves the construction of Communism. They do not need war to attain their goal. But to protect the Soviet people's peaceful labour we must study our military experience in defending the socialist motherland, and make use of what will help us ensure the country's defences in the most effective way and train and rear our Armed Forces in the right spirit."

"The risks of war present no danger to those who are well prepared for it in advance and who are mindful of their place in the nation's defences. Confusion and panic usually appear wherever there is no adequate organizaton or appropriate leadership at a time of grim trials."

"It is a fact that under equal conditions, large-scale battles and whole wars are won by troops which have a strong will for victory, clear goals before them, high moral standards, and devotion to the banner under which they go into battle."

"None were any good in 1941. Of Budyenny (Semyon Budyonny), who commanded the armies facing me, a captured Russian officer aptly remarked — ‘He is a man with a very large moustache, but a very small brain.’ But in later years there is no doubt of the improvement in their generalship. Zhukov was very good. It is interesting to recall that he first studied strategy in Germany under General von Seeckt - this was about 1921-23."

"In spite of the biographer's best efforts, the Soviet military leader remains personally a shadowy figure. We cannot see him at home, with his wife, children, and grandchildren, nor can we learn much about his personal likes or dislikes, his family life, his moments of despair and elation. Although Soviet secrecy plays a strong part in formulating these restrictions, they are to some extent also in the tradition of Russian letters, and any biographer of Marshal Zhukov who resits his case, as Chaney does, on the strictest accuracy of the utilization of his source material, has to make his book a study of Zhukov the soldier and relatively little of Zhukov the man."

"The Soviet marshal Georgi Zhukov is much less famous in the West than generals such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery, but he was undoubtedly the greatest commander of the Second World War, turning the tide against the Nazi invaders at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and then leading the Red Army in its bloody counteroffensive all the way to Berlin. Without the heroic Soviet effort, with its sacrifice of 26 million lives, the war might have ended very differently. Zhukov was a communist and a ruthless Stalinist general who placed results far above his concern for individuals and casualties and used summary executions at the front to enforce discipline. Yet he was also a gifted leader who represents not the cruelty of his master, Soviet dictator Stalin, but the heroism of the Russian people."

"To the Soviet soldier"

"The truth was that one of the great military disasters of our time was in the making on the night of June 21-22, 1941- the colossal tactical surprise which Hitler's armies achieved over the Russians. Within hours the Soviet Air Force would lie burnt, wrecked, destroyed on the ground, its commanders facing the firing squad or cheating the executioner by suicide. The flower of the Red Army would be staggering east, some units decimated, many without arms, others virtually exterminated. Hundreds of thousands of troops would find themselves fatally trapped and encircled, scores or even hundreds of miles behind the spearheads of the advancing Nazi panzers. Within a few weeks German armies would stand at the gates of Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow, and the fate of the Soviet state would hang in the balance. As the clock ticked away that long spring evening, it brought Stalin and his Russia minute by minute closer to disaster. By the same token it propelled Zhukov into perhaps the most striking military career of the century."

"I find it rather difficult in the evening of my life to recollect everything that happened as time has erased from memory many things, especially relating to childhood and youth."

"Yet at the end of the war Zhukov's prestige was so enormous that he shared the podium with Stalin at the great Moscow victory parade in June, 1945, and entertained as his guest his fellow commander and friend, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The two men were not merely military associates, fellow members of the Kommendatura in Berlin. They had genuine empathy. Both were popular figures, heroes in their countries, nonpolitical men, men with a rather simplistic view of life. Eisenhower came to Moscow as Zhukov's guest. He invited Zhukov to visit America as his guest. Zhukov accepted. To many it seemed that Zhukov's prestige was such that he might well be Stalin's first minister and probable successor. It seemed that in any event the influence of Zhukov and of the other great Soviet generals would be such that they would dominate postwar Soviet political life. The calculations failed. They did not take into account Stalin and the nature of Kremlin politics. Zhukov never had a chance to make his visit to the United States as Ike's guest. Indeed, he never even met his old friend Ambassador Smith in Moscow."

"He is thinner, taller, younger – more boyish-looking – than expected, but he is also the shyest and most nervous human being I have ever seen. He chews not merely his nails but his fingers, twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the next. His hands tremble, he stutters, his whole frame wobbles when he shakes hands…There is no betrayal of the thoughts behind those frightened, very intelligent eyes."

"Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention…All his works are marked by emotional extremes – tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm."

"Part of the task, of course, is simply insisting that female experience is human experience and worthy of being explored in literature...as Shostakovich said (speaking of Yevtoshenko’s Babi Yar poem mourning the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during World War II, defying the official cover-up), “Art destroys silence.” To bring what is silenced into speech is to make a space."

"Not since the time of Berlioz has a symphonic composer created such a stir. In far-away America, great conductors vie with each other for the jus primae noctis of his music. The score of his Seventh Symphony, the symphony of struggle and victory, has been reduced to a roll of microfilm and flown half-way across the world...to speed the day of the American première. How the old romantics would have loved to be the center of such a fantastic adventure!"

"Neuhaus was sitting next to him at a performance…that was being badly conducted by Alexander Gauk. Neuhaus leaned over to whisper in Shostakovich’s ear: “Dmitry Dmitrievich, this is awful.” Whereupon Shostakovich turned to Neuhaus: “You’re right, Heinrich Gustavovich! It’s splendid! Quite remarkable!” Realising that he’d been misunderstood, Neuhaus repeated his earlier remark: “Yes,” muttered Shostakovich, “it’s awful, quite awful.” That was Shostakovich to the life."

"He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts."

"I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing," and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.""

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."

"I write music, it's performed. It can be heard, and whoever wants to hear it will. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music."

"Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music."

"The majority of my symphonies are tombstones."

"People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."

"What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel."

"For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place."

"It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over."

"The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something."

"The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity."

"I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist…Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky."

"You ask if I would have been different without "Party guidance"? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage."

"I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death."

"Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have "leftist" confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, "formalist" attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

"There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters, you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters."

"What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music."

"The withering away of illusions is a long and dreary process, like a toothache. But you can pull out a tooth. Illusions, dead, continue to rot within us. And stink. And you can't escape them. I carry all of mine around with me."

"If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth."

"The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue."

"Pornophony."

"I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault."

"What do you think of Puccini? [ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ] No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music."

"Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward."

"Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture."

"I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported."

"A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it."

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist."

"Why did Churchill, so hard-headed about Hitler, maintain such illusions about Stalin’s tractability? In large part it was because the two dictators were viewed very differently in the West. In contrast with the plenitude of information available on Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet regime had remained virtually a closed book during this period. Diplomatic staff had minimal opportunity for contacts with Russian officials, let alone the ordinary population. Even ambassadors rarely met Stalin; they dealt with his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, renowned as a hard-faced “Mr. Nyet.” Moreover the Soviet press provided virtually no useful political intelligence, in stark contrast with the media in Washington, which offered endless insights into the White House and Capitol Hill. Churchill spoke aptly in 1939 of Soviet policy as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Then suddenly the Soviets needed outside help and the doors to the Kremlin were flung open. In the second half of 1941, Roosevelt’s emissaries Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman and Churchill’s right-hand men Max Beaverbrook and Anthony Eden all spent hours with Stalin. Churchill met him for extended summits on five occasions, joined by Roosevelt for two of them."

"One former member of [the antiparty] group [Molotov] became an ambassador. True, the country Outer Mongolia] may not be large, but it is an ambassadorship. I do not want to mention names, but you have some former Secretaries of State. I do not know where they are today, but they are not ambassadors. A second member of the group Kaganovich] is now head of the state asbestos trust. Is that punishment, to head up a big monopoly? … It is better to confess to one's errors than to persist in them."

"Molotov has a fine forehead, and looks and acts like a French professor of medicine — orderly, precise, pedantic. His importance is sometimes not appreciated; he is by no means a mere figurehead, but a man of first-rate intelligence and influence. Molotov is a vegetarian and a teetotaler. Stalin gives him much of the dirty work to do. He had the nasty job of admitting how many cattle and hogs were killed by the peasants before the famine."

"We went over to Lancaster House where the last hours of the conference between the wartime allies were being played out... I thought Molotov radiated evil in a way that I have never encountered before or since. Anthony Eden told me that he was the cruellest man he had ever met. In 1991 I read General Dmitri Volkoganov's biography of Stalin, described by critics as the first serious treatment of Stalin to come out of Moscow. The references to Molotov's role are chilling, and his signature appears again and again with Stalin's on documents condemning hundreds upon hundreds of men and women to death."

"The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that."

"There is no alternative to class struggle."