Top 20Th Century Russia Quotes

A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism

She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made i...

My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouti...

Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate...

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign...

Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might...

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear....

Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand...

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Flore...

Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his...

The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked...

Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the sp...

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat...

Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them danci...

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. The...