#roy medvedev

[quotes-by-dilanka]

The leaders of the Gulag labor camps tried to starve prisoners' desires for things that were not aligned with their ideas of what was desirable.

They fed those that were.

Author Roy Medvedev recounts one woman's experience after being released: "I am disappointed in everything and believe in nothing anymore, but I have one desire: to eat ice cream every day, not beauty, not love.

Her desire for anything more than ice cream had been destroyed.

But now she needed a refrigerator and economic security to eat ice cream all the time.

She ended up supporting the very political party that had enslaved her because it was the only party that promised to help her fulfill the impoverished desire they had given her.

—Luke Burgis, Wanting

[jstalin5ever]

Stalin did not rely on terror alone, but also on the support of the majority of the people; effectively deceived by cunning propaganda, they gave Stalin credit for the successes of others and even for 'achievements' that were in fact totally fictitious.

Roy Medvedev

[wisdomfish]

I feel my helplessness before a hellish machine

Too late Bukharin realized into whose hands he had fallen. In a letter which he made his wife memorize just before his arrest and execution, he said: I am leaving life. I am lowering my head ... I feel my helplessness before a hellish machine*. . .

He had helped erect a guillotine—the Soviet State; that had killed millions, only to learn in the end that its design had been made in hell. He had desired to be the Antichrist. He became instead its victim.

- Richard Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, Living Sacrifice Book Company, p. 51

- *Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971), p. 183