Alexander Zinoviev

“While considering communalism as a universal phenomenon, I emphasized that only communist society was totally governed according to the laws of communality. p 424”

“The problem is no longer how to build paradise on Earth, but how to live there. p. 424”

“Stalin is not the creator of Russian tragedy, he was only its expression. p. 340”

“Any fool can assert himself at the expense of the past.p 339”

“…[the] historical Stalinism (or simply Stalinism) is the form in which communist society was created in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin, his lieutenants and all those who carried out their wishes and acted in accordance with their ideas and directives (the latter can be described as "historical Stalinists". Communist society is not the product of one man's will. It arose in obedience to objective social laws, which revealed themselves through activity of certain individuals, so that the form they took bears the mark of Stalin and the Stalinists. p. 337”

“Any attempt to describe the dialectical method as a set of logical techniques (and this was indeed the purpose of my work) was doomed to vilification: Soviet philosophy had established dialectics as a doctrine of the general laws of the universe. p. 324”

“By transforming Marxism into an official ideology, dialectics had no longer been made an instrument of knowledge of complex realities, but a means of stupefication and ideological fraud. p. 324”

“[...] the dialectical method is nothing other than scientific thinking in conditions where, to paraphrase Marx, the methods of experimental and empirical investigation must give way to the force of abstraction, to theoretical postulates and deductions applied to a changing and complex interconnection of relationships and processes. John Stuart Mill had already attempted to describe such a method, but God knows why it was never compared to dialectics p. 323”

“This debate forced me to develop my own conception of these aspects of philosophy. I decided to design a discipline which would encompass as an object of study the problems of logic, gnoseology, ontology, methodology, and dialectics as well as other subjects which touch on the general problems of language and knowledge. I considered the name of the said discipline to be secondary. “Philosophy” didn’t fit. […]. Over time, I began to use the term "complex logic" to distinguish what I was doing from what others were doing. p. 317”

“Every war reveals in one way or another the fundamental characteristics of the societies involved in it. p.196”

“Communist society arose in Russia in full conformity with the laws of evolution and not as a chance exception. The October Revolution simply cleared the way for a trend that had already been present in Russia for centuries. p. 153”

“The thirties were the darkest and at the same time the most optimistic period in Soviet history. p. 99”

“I believe that to succeed in any sphere of human activity, it is not enough to have the dispositions. Even if we are very talented, if we are not supported by those who are able to recognize and encourage a talent, success is impossible p. 99”

“According to a well-established opinion, kolkhozes were invented by Stalinist villains out of purely ideological considerations. Pure nonsense! The idea is not Marxist, it even has nothing to do with classical Marxism. Far from being a fruit of theory, it emerged in practical life as the product of a very real, nothing less than imaginary, communism. Ideology was only a means of justifying a historical evolution. p. 68”

“The problem with slavery is not why people are forced to become slaves, but why they allow themselves to be enslaved. p. 67”

“Russian society before the revolution was torn between three forces: a disappearing nobility system, embryonic capitalism and a state bureaucracy. The latter was so predominant in our "hole" that the mass of the population hardly noticed the other two. For this reason, the February revolution went unnoticed. p. 36”

“Perestroika is nothing but a spectacle organized from above.”

“The scientific approach uncovers, that Communism does not eliminate the inequality between men, the social injustice, exploitation of man by man and other evils of society – communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils, which become eternal fellow-travelers of communism.”

“Gorbachevism, carried out by mediocre but ambitious party bureaucrats, is an attempt not only to outdo the people but also the objective laws of human society.”

“They new the old folk wisdom: what has been built might be really crap and therefore it doesn’t make any sense to dig it, for the smell could make the life really impossible. They regarded Gorbachev exactly that kind of a fool, who had broken the rule.”