In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the pervasive fear and control under Stalin's regime, emphasizing how the mechanisms of oppression are always ready to be activated.
Svetlana Alexievich captures the chilling reality of life under Stalin's rule, where the machinery of terror is permanently in place, ready to inflict suffering at any moment. The reference to informers, denunciations, and tortures underlines the oppressive atmosphere of mistrust and brutality that characterized this period in history, demonstrating how quickly and easily a regime can mobilize its repressive apparatus to instill fear among the populace.
Themes
StalinTerrorOppressionFearDenunciation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a historical lecture about totalitarian regimes.
More from Svetlana Alexievich
All quotes βThe subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.
Svetlana AlexievichRead
Similar quotes
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
Tom BrokawRead
Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
Elie WieselRead
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
Ron ChernowRead
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
Lal Bahadur ShastriRead
There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.
Wilma MankillerRead
So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
Samuel Eliot MorisonRead