TheLolGuy Posted May 6, 2015 Posted May 6, 2015 I'm currently reading A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by historian Orlando Figes. Thought you guys would be interested in some of the quotes I found. "In Saratov province, for example, the provincial welfare department issued a 'Decree on the Nationalisation of Women': it abolished marriage and gave men the right to release their sexual urges at licensed brothels. Kollontai's (Commissar for Social Welfare) subordinates set up a 'Bureau of Free Love' in Vladimir and issued a proclamation requiring all the unmarried women between the ages of 18 to 50 to register with it for the selection of their sexual mates. The proclamation declared all women over 18 to be 'state property' and gave men the right to choose a registered woman, even without her consent, for breeding 'in the interests of the state.'" - Page 741 Here is a quote on the Soviet schooling system - "As Lilina Zinoviev, one of the pioneers of Soviet schooling, declared at a Congress of Public Education in 1918: "We must make the young generation into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of family life... We must nationalise them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of communist schools. They will learn the ABC of communism... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet State - that is our task."" - Page 743 One last quote on a Bolsheviks vision for human life. "Alexei Gastev's (Head of Central Institute of Labour) aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of human robot... Gastev envisaged a brave new world where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as 'A, B, C or 325, 075, 0 and so on.'" - page 744 All the dystopian novels of Orwell, Huxley and Rand don't seem to be all that exaggerated when you come to read of life under the Bolsheviks! 2
Recommended Posts