Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

My mom told me many times how I need to be careful living inside the regime. We didn't say 'the regime.' We didn't even say 'North Korea.'

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

The worst thing our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

In the years of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the voice of dissent was stifled by universal denunciations, house searches, and preventive arrests.

One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

The saddest country I went to was Romania, years ago, during Ceausescu's rule.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

A functioning police state needs no police.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.