Moscow

Here are luxury and penury, abundance and the most extreme deprivation, piety and atheism, … and an unbelievable frivolity—warring elements which, out of their constant conflicts, create this marvelous, outrageous, gigantic whole which we know by its collective name: Moscow. ~ Konstantin Batyushkov

Moscow (Москва) is the capital city and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural and scientific center in Russia and in Eurasia. According to Forbes 2013, Moscow has the largest community of billionaires in the world. Moscow is the northernmost megacity on Earth, the second most populous city in Europe after Istanbul and the 6th largest city proper in the world.

Quotes

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

• That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you.
  • "You will hear thunder and remember me...", translated by D. M. Thomas
  • That day, in Moscow, a true prophecy, when for the last time I say goodbye, soaring to the heavens that I longed to see, leaving my shadow here in the sky.
    • "Thunder," Anna Akhmatova, translated by A.S.Kline

B

• When I first visited Moscow in the late 1980s, I was so intimidated. I thought I could be checkmated by every cabdriver.
  • Viswanathan Anand, Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Inc McKinsey & Company (19 November 2013). Simon and Schuster. p. 291. ISBN 978-1-4767-3530-6.
• And for us in this country to think of having, for example, a dictatorship—a popular form of government in many countries to-day—would, on our part, be an act of consummate cowardice, an act of surrender, of throwing in our hands, a confession that we were unable to govern ourselves...In this country we do not want what I call the "get-rich-quick" mind. Speed and efficiency are very good things, and they are, perhaps, the idols of this generation. But they do not necessarily go together. Acceleration, as I have often said, is not a synonym for civilisation. It is quite true the State coach of this country may be going through heavy ground, the wheels may be creaking; but are you quite sure that the wheels of the State coach are not creaking to-day in Moscow, in Berlin, in Vienna? Are you quite certain that they are not creaking even in the United States of America?
  • Stanley Baldwin, Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 21.

• Here are luxury and penury, abundance and the most extreme deprivation, piety and atheism, … and an unbelievable frivolity—warring elements which, out of their constant conflicts, create this marvelous, outrageous, gigantic whole which we know by its collective name: Moscow.
  • Konstantin Batyushkov, in 1812, as quoted in City Journal (2013)

• The Communists’ central position was crucial to their war effort, as they had control of the vital populous centres, the industrial areas, including key arms factories around Moscow, and of leading rail nodes, notably Moscow and St Petersburg. Arms supplies were a vital element. For example, foreign troops were sent to Archangel and eventually deployed along the Northern Dvina River to prevent the Communists from seizing the sizeable amount of Western armaments originally destined for the imperial Russian army. As was to be the case in World War Two, these arms had been shipped from Britain. In control of the major cities, the Communists were able to seize and make use of dominance of the telegraph, telephone and postal services. This situation was opposite to the geo-strategy of conflict seen with the Maoist theory of war and with the guerrilla operations that characterised most (but not all) of the conflicts in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s. In these, the revolutionaries operated from marginal areas, while their opponents controlled the cities. However, in the Russian Civil War, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, the Whites lacked manufacturing capacity.
  • Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)

• By retaining control of St Petersburg and Moscow, the Communists, in a traditional Russian response to attackers, could afford to trade space for time. They did so in what was very much a war of movement, a characteristic of a conflict with a lower force density than that on the Western Front in World War One. Indeed, by October 1919, White forces were within 250 miles of Moscow, as well as close to St Petersburg. Nevertheless, the Communist ability to trade space for time, while benefiting from a central position, provided an opportunity to benefit from the failings of the anti- Communist forces. These failings owed much to their internal divisions and to their political and strategic mismanagement. Although, in combination, there was a formidable array of opponents, each of the anti-Communist forces had its own goals, and they sometimes took non-cooperation as far as conflict.
  • Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)

• Best view of Moscow is from the belly of the bomber.
  • Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life (2011), by Lev Losev, Yale University Press

• We have no idea whether there were any other strange occurences in Moscow that night, and we have no intention of trying to find out, since the time has come for us to proceed to Part Two of this true narrative. Follow me, reader!
  • Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1967), Book One in 'Unlucky Visitors', B/O, the last lines of Book One

C

• Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
  • Anton Chekhov, Three Years (1895)

• Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward.
  • Jean Chrétien, My Years As Prime Minister (2007) Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007, ISBN 978-0-676-97900-8 Chapter Fourteen, Vive le Canada, p. 406

• From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
  • Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, United States
  • Sinews of Peace. (2009, July 29). In Wikisource, The Free Library.

• What is to be said of leaders with the mental acuity and moral perceptions revealed by these disclosed words and deeds? They are at best enemies of life without understanding. Psychologically, they disconnect all feeling for the beauty of the planet — a rose, an impala in motion, a baby’s hand, a Confucian analect, a Bach cantata, a parable of Jesus, pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, a crowd watching a soccer game in Rio, the subway in Moscow, the skyline in Manhattan. They cannot think or feel about the human meaning of what they do.,, A single Trident II submarine can inflict more death than all prior wars in history. Twenty-four missiles, launched while submerged, each with seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads five times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, can travel 5,000 nautical miles to strike within 300 feet of 408 predetermined targets. Nuclear winter might follow even if no other weapons are used.
  • Ramsey Clark, From His foreword in To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans by Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod ISBN 0-89608-321-7. (1987)

• As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. (That is, no study at that time; 10 or 15 years later senior policy officials were debating how good an idea this might be. If you wiped out the political leadership of the Soviet Union in the process, who would you deal with in arranging for a truce and who would be left to run the country after the war?) Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of determining, with the help of computers, in great detail, precisely what would happen to the city were a bomb of so many megatons dropped on it. It was truly a daunting task and called for devising a mathematical model unimaginably complex; one that would deal with the exact population distribution, the precise location of various industries and government agencies, the vulnerability of all the important structures to the bomb’s effects, etc., etc. However, these two guys were up to the task and toiled in the vineyards for some months, finally coming up with the results. Naturally, they were horrendous. (Harold Mitchell, a medical doctor, an expert on human vulnerability to the H-bomb’s effects, told me when the study first began: “Why are they wasting their time going through all this shit? You know goddamned well that a bomb this big is going to blow the fucking city into the next county. What more do you have to know?” I had to agree with him.)
  • Samuel T. Cohen, F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

• The capital of the Russian Federation shall be the city of Moscow. The status of the capital shall be established by federal law. Another city defined by a federal constitutional law can be the place of residents of certain federal bodies of state power.
  • Section 2, Article 70 of the Constitution of Russia

F

• The Bolsheviks were able to take power in 1917 in spite of their numerical insignificance not because they had fashioned a fool-proof coup d’état but because they advanced on the crest of a revolutionary peasant wave, which in the hinterland had carried out revolutionary slogans months before they were taken over by the Bolsheviks. At the head of this vast peasant mass, the Bolsheviks were enabled, in the first phrase, to overcome the resistance of large urban groups and, later, when foreign intervention and the regrouping of the White forces had reduced Soviet Russia to the Grand Principality of Moscow, to overcoming all counter-revolutionary attempts and throw the invaders back to the borders of the country.
  • Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (1948) p. 649 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1948

G

• When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!
  • Yuri Gagarin, Recalling his meeting with workers in a field, upon his landing, as quoted in "Life on Mars?" by Jesse Skinner in Toro magazine (14 October 2008)

• Not only is Moscow “the clearest symbol of the present-day empire,” [Gleb Khodakovsky] argues, but in its current form, the line between “’city’” and “’federal’” has been blurred to the point of non-existence, leading Muscovites to view themselves not as residents of a city but as rulers of the country, a status no one elected them to.
  • Paul A. Goble, "Moscow Must Not Only Cease to Be the Capital; It Must Cease Being a Single City, Khodakovsky Says", Window on Eurasia (July 28, 2019)

• Patton was convinced that a confrontation with the Soviet Union was bound to come to a head, and he knew the American army was at present superior- his Third Army alone contained nearly half a million combat veterans. "We could beat hell out of them," Patton announced. To a visiting undersecretary of war Patton strongly recommended that the administration not break up the American army at the conclusion of the war in Europe but leave it in place in case the Communists threatened to overrun all of Europe. When the horrified diplomat responded, "You don't realize the strength of these people," Patton scoffed that with the kind of fighting he could give them the Russians might be able to defend themselves up to five days or a week. "After that... if you wanted Moscow, I could give it to you."
  • Winston Groom, The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II (2015), p. 394-395

H

• The two armies [Red Army and Nazi Army] met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”.
  • Daniel Hannan, "Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism" (February 25, 2014), The Telegraph

• What hurts me the most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction... a man like that besmirches the heroism of so many others at the last moment. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow.
  • Adolf Hitler, about Friedrich Paulus surrendering instead of committing suicide at the end of the Battle of Stalingrad.

• To illustrate how dramatically populations can displace each other over time, the historian E.M. Kulischer once reminded his readers that in A.D. 900 Berlin had no Germans, Moscow had no Russians, Budapest had no Hungarians, Madrid was a Moorish settlement, and Constantinople had hardly any Turks. He added that the Normans had not yet settled in Great Britain and before the sixteenth century there were no Europeans living in North or South America, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa.
  • Neil Howe, Richard Jackson (2008) The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. p. 15

I

• Béranger represented the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.
  • Eugène Ionesco, on the anit-totalitarian themes in one of his plays, in "Eugene Ionesco, The Art of Theater No. 6" interviewed by Shusha Guppy, in Paris Review (Fall 1984), No. 93

J

• I was taken to see the World Exhibition in Moscow [in 1880]. I found it all very boring. But when I came to a section devoted to art – there were only paintings, and this was the first time of my life [Jawlensky was 16 years old] I had seen paintings – I was so deeply affected that it was a case of Saul becoming Paul. It was the turning point of my life. Even since then art has been my ideal, my holy of holiest, that for which my entire soul and my entire self yearn.
  • Alexej von Jawlensky, 'Life Memories' (1938), p. 20

K

• In this painting ['Moscow'], I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day.. .The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot, which as a frenzied tuba makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul.. .Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny day. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy.
  • Wassily Kandinsky, Quote from: 'Looks on the past', Wassily Kandinsky; published in der Sturm, Berlin 1913

• The Bolsheviki under Lenin's leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Czarist dictatorship.
  • Karl Kautsky, Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship (1934)

• When I was in Moscow many people made severe criticisms about North Korea but you feel a more patriotic man when you're abroad. I thought, 'Whatever they say, I will not be concerned, I will do my best, be loyal, and serve my country with my musical ability. began to realise I would have to sacrifice many things to live as a pianist in North Korea, and I felt disillusioned
  • Kim Cheol-woong, Interrogated for playing the wrong tune (8 July 2015)

• Unlike the West, which is already nervous about the arrival of refugees, Moscow alone has taken in more Muslims than the whole of Europe has done by now. And nobody in the world is aware of it. And there is no hysteria, no police, no gas, no physical clashes. Of course, problems do arise sometimes with people who arrive but these problems get solved within the law, and most importantly, the good Orthodox-Muslim relations are creating an atmosphere for Muslims here to live peacefully and for the Orthodox to treat Muslims respectfully, with tolerance, like brothers. You probably felt what remarkable, good relations have developed between the Orthodox people and Muslims in Russia. We are very glad that finally this big mosque has been built in the city of Moscow to become a place of prayer for many Muslims who live in Moscow and visit Moscow.
  • Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, 24 September 2015 at a meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at his residence in Peredelkino, Moscow Region,

• The theatres of the capital [Moscow] were developing a great interest in German drama. In fact, everything Germanic was the vogue. A brutal John Bull and an Uncle Sam enthroned on money bags figured in the propaganda, but the Nazis were exempt from such ridicule. Hundreds of German military men and trade officials were in evidence in Moscow hotels and shops. They were busy with the gigantic program of Soviet economic help to Hitler’s crusade against the ‘degenerate democracies.’
  • Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946)

L

• And none so poor to do it reverence. What happened? Surely something did, for that portrait of Kennedy can hardly be recognised from the version we have today. He is now widely thought of, when he is thought of at all, as either an earlier model of President Carter, all goodwill and muddle, or a belligerent adventurer likely to follow the Bay of Pigs fiasco with an unprovoked nuclear strike on Moscow. Was it all show and froth, good looks and rhetoric? I do not believe it. In the first place, Kennedy was not a liberal in the Carter mode (let alone the Dukakis version); it would almost be closer to the reality to say that he was a liberal in the sense of the Manchester school.
  • Bernard Levin, "The Last Hurrah", The Times, November 21, 1988.

• This is a Government of to-morrow. ... It is all swagger and pose, and no action. Let it be done. No, he cannot do it, he is too busy doing other things. Russia must come first. No time to carry schemes for the unemployed, no time to deal with profiteering in food and in materials for building. ... Yet there was time for a Russian loan. Moscow first, and Camberwell afterwards.
  • David Lloyd George, Speech in Camberwell, London, on Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Government (27 October 1924), quoted in The Times (28 October 1924), p. 8

• It is needless to rehearse the utter and degrading loss of individual liberty which results from the orthodox communistic theory that society is itself an organism in which each person is merely an insignificant cell. It is not in anti-Soviet libels, but in the proud reports of Soviet leaders, that we read of the forcible transfer of whole village populations from their ancestral abodes to new locations in the Arctic, and of the arbitrary ordering of Moscow clerks to tasks of manual labour in the farms and forests of Siberia. All these things are logical outgrowths of what the Bolsheviks call their “collectivistic ideology”, and typical examples of the horrors which might fall upon us if communism were to gain a foothold here.
  • H. P. Lovecraft, "Some Repetitions on the Times", (1933). Reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings, edited by S.T. Joshi. Arkham House, 1995.

M

• Greetings, glorious capital,
  Heart of the Motherland - Moscow!
  The whole country is proud of you.
  • Aleksei Mashistov, "Zdravstvuj, slavnaya stolitsa" (1947)
  • Original Russian: Здравствуй, славная столица, Сердце Родины - Москва! Вся страна тобой гордится.

• Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives.
  • Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, In the House of Lords, 30 May 1962 (Hansard, Col. 227)

• We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.
  • Malcolm Muggeridge, The Great Liberal Death Wish, lecture at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, USA, March 1979. Transcript in Imprimis May 1979 (pdf).

N

• Nothing is perhaps more confusing to the student of Russia than the conflicting reports that come of the treatment of prisoners and of the criminal law. We are told of the Red Terror and ghastly and horrible details are provided for our consumption; we are also told that the Russian prison is an ideal residence where anyone can live in comfort and ease and with a minimum of restraint. Our own visit to the chief prison in Moscow created a most favourable impression on our minds.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1949)

O

• When it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead.
  • Barack Obama, State of the Union address (12 January 2016)

• Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
  • P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell, 1989

• [T]he English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
  • George Orwell, England Your England,

P

• The initial press commentary in Moscow on the formation of the first Mussolini government was not overwhelmingly anti-Fascist, despite the Duce’s talk of a ‘revolutionary rivalry’ with Lenin. Fascism was sometimes perceived not inaccurately as more of a heresy from, rather than a moral challenge to, revolutionary Marxism.
  • Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914—1945, p. 126. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

• At the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923, Nikolia Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had ‘inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.’ On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany.
  • Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914—1945. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. p. 126

R

• The generals of the two invading armies went over the details of the prearranged line that would mark the two zones of conquest for Germany and Soviet Russia, subsequently to be rearranged one more time in Moscow. The military parade that followed was recorded by Nazi cameras and celebrated in the German newsreel: German and Soviet generals cheek by jowl n military homage to each other's armies and victories.
  • Raack, Richard (1995). Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945. Stanford University Press. p. 58. ISBN 0804724156.

• Instead of being a destructive force, it seems tome that the Bolsheviki were the only party in Russia with a constructive program and the power to impose it on the country. If they had not succeeded to the Government when they did, there is little doubt in my mind that the armies of Imperial Germany would have been in Petrograd and Moscow in December, and Russia would again be ridden by a Tsar.
  • John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World. 2006 Dover Press edition.

• The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes an epochal change in the way people live. More important, it liberates the way people think. We see with new clarity that centralized government bureaucracies created in this century are not the wave of the future. Never again will people trust planners and paper shufflers more than they trust themselves. We all watched as the statue of Soviet hangman Feliks Dzherzhinsky was toppled in front of Moscow's KGB headquarters by the very people his evil empire sought to enslave. Its sightless eyes symbolized the moral blindness of totalitarians around the world. They could never see the indomitable spirit of people determined to be free from government control—free to build a better future with their own heads, hands, and hearts. We Republicans saw clearly the dangers of collectivism: not only the military threat, but the deeper threat to the souls of people bound in dependence. Here at home, we warned against Big Government, because we knew concentrated decision-making, no matter how well-intentioned, was a danger to liberty and prosperity. Republicans stood at the rampart of freedom, defending the individual against the domineering state. While we did not always prevail, we always stood our ground, faithful to our principles and confident of history's ultimate verdict.
  • Republican Party Platform of 1992 (17 August 1992), Republican National Convention,

• Wall Street says I am an agent of Moscow, and Moscow says I am an agent of Wall Street.
  • Walter Reuter, Text of interview with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, San Francisco, California, September 20, 1959, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 314

• The mingling of object and image in collage, of given fact and conscious artifice, corresponds to the illusion-producing processes of contemporary civilization. In advertisements, news stories, films, and political campaigns, lumps of unassailable data are implanted in preconceived formats in order to make the entire fabrication credible. Documents waved at hearings by Joseph McCarthy to substantiate his fictive accusations were a version of collage, as is the corpse of Lenin, inserted by Stalin into the Moscow mausoleum to authenticate his own contrived ideology. Twentieth-century fictions are rarely made up of the whole cloth, perhaps because the public has been trained to have faith in "information." Collage is the primary formula of the aesthetics of mystification developed in our time.
  • Harold Rosenberg. Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (1975) p. 178 University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-72674-6

• Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well... I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory. The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat....When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic... He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing.
  • Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

S

• Bertrand Russell once told a peace congress in Moscow that "the world will be saved from thermonuclear annihilation if the leaders of each of the two systems prefer complete victory of the other system to a thermonuclear war." (I am quoting from memory.) It seems to me that such a solution would be acceptable to the majority of people in any country, whether capitalist or socialist. I consider that the leaders of the capitalist and socialist systems by the very nature of things will gradually be forced to adopt the point of view of the majority of mankind.
  • Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)

• I am naturally anti-Russian just as most Germans are. I admire their achievements in industrial fields. I was in Moscow personally. I would not be in favor of the Russian system in the western nations. I don't condemn the system — I recognize the good results that it has produced in its proper setting. But in order to be Communist, one must be a fanatic. I am very suspicious of all systems requiring fanaticism. I am convinced that the world would be a better place if people were satisfied with enough to eat and a job to keep them occupied.
  • Paul Schmidt, To Leon Goldensohn (13 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

• The danger that hung over Moscow in the winter of 1941 struck [Hitler] as similar to his present predicament. In a brief access of confidence, he might remark with a jesting tone of voice that it would be best, after victory over Russia, to entrust the administration of the country to Stalin, under German hegemony, of course, since he was the best imaginable man to handle the Russians. In general he regarded Stalin as a kind of colleague. When Stalin's son was taken prisoner it was out of this respect, perhaps, that Hitler ordered him to be given especially good treatment.
  • Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970) p. 306

• A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaded to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause, rising to an ovation," continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop?The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who'd been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heat attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minute! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter...Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: "Don't ever be the first to stop applauding!"
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Part I The Prison Industry, Ch. 2 "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System" (p28, The Gulag Archipelago, Collins 1974)

• Officials at the Reich Security Main Office planned the annihilation with cynical precision. They planned a war that declared the entire Soviet population – the entire Soviet population – to be the enemies, from newborn babies to the very old. The enemies were to be defeated not just militarily, but were also to be made to pay for the war imposed upon them themselves, with their lives, their property, with everything that was part of their existence. The entire European part of the Soviet Union, whole stretches of today's Ukraine and Belarus – and I quote from the orders – were to be "cleansed" and prepared for German colonisation. Metropolises such as Leningrad, present-day Saint Petersburg, Moscow or Kyiv, were to be razed to the ground.
  • Frank-Walter Steinmeier, As quoted in the Anniversary of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union speech, 18 June 2021

T

• 1989 will be remembered for decades to come as the year when half the people of half our continent began to throw off their chains. The messages on our banners in 1979—freedom, opportunity, family, enterprise, ownership—are now inscribed on the banners in Leipzig, Warsaw, Budapest and even Moscow...In 1979, we knew that we were starting a British revolution; in fact, we were the pioneers of a world revolution.
  • Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference (13 October 1989)

• The hotels are entirely run by the Moscow Soviet, which seems to have picked its employees rather for their political reliability than for their experience or cleverness at hotel management.
  • Dorothy Thompson, "The New Russia", New York: NY, Henry Holt and Company, (1928)

• Newspaper headlines from Moscow to Washington and Sydney to Kiev all agree: the cold war is back. Well, maybe
  • Simon Tisdall, "The new cold war: are we going back to the bad old days?" From The Guardian (19 November 2014)

• To Joseph Stalin: Stop sending people to kill me! We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another.
  • Josip Broz Tito, as quoted in Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 592.
  • Message found among the personal effects of Stalin.

• I have no relationship with Putin. I don't think I've ever met him. I never met him. I don't think I've ever met him. ... I have never spoken to him on the phone, no. I've speak -- I've spoken -- when we had the Miss Universe contest a number of years ago, we had Miss Universe in Moscow, in the Moscow area, he was invited. He wanted to come. He wasn't able to come. That would have been a time when I would have met him. ... I don't know what it means by having a relationship. I mean he was saying very good things about me, but I don't have a relationship with him. I didn't meet him. I haven't spent time with him. I didn't have dinner with him. I didn't go hiking with him. I don't know -- and I wouldn't know him from Adam except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like.
  • Donald Trump, Interview on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos. (31 July 2016)

• Reporter: Would a reasonable observer say that you are potentially vulnerable to blackmail by Russia or by its intelligence agencies? Trump: Lemme just tell you what I do. When I leave our country, I'm a very high-profile person, would you say? I am extremely careful. I'm surrounded by bodyguards. I'm surrounded by people. And I always tell them—anywhere, but I always tell them if I'm leaving this country, "Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you're gonna probably have cameras." I'm not referring just to Russia, but I would certainly put them in that category. And number one, "I hope you're gonna be good anyway. But in those rooms, you have cameras in the strangest places. Cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can't see them and you won't know. You better be careful, or you'll be watching yourself on nightly television." I tell this to people all the time. I was in Russia years ago, with the Miss Universe contest, which did very well—Moscow, the Moscow area did very, very well. And I told many people, "Be careful, because you don't wanna see yourself on television. Cameras all over the place." And again, not just Russia, all over. Does anyone really believe that story? I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.
  • Donald Trump, Press Conference at Trump Tower (11 January 2017)

V

• I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism.
  • Roman Vishniac, Testament to a Lost People

W

• The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet.
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975 ISBN 978-0156717205

• We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will.
  • Kevin D. Williamson, "The End of (Whig) History" (1 July 2020), National Review

Z

• Nazis did not expect Soviet resistance to be so strong. The deeper they moved into this country's territory, the more fierce it became. When Hitler's armies approached Moscow, every man and woman here thought it imperative to resist the enemy. And that resistance grew by the day. The enemy was sustaining heavy losses, one after another. In fact, Hitler's best troops perished here. Nazis believed the Red Army was not capable of defending Moscow, but their schemes failed.
  • Georgy Zhukov, Quoted in "The Voice of Russia" - Copyright 2005 - by Olga Troshina

• 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.
  • Aleksandr Zinovyev, Katastroika (1988)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Moscow on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of Moscow on Wiktionary
• Moscow travel guide from Wikivoyage