Alexander Zinoviev Quotes

The roots of communism existed and exist, in one form or another, in the most diverse societies. They also existed in pre-revolutionary Russia. They exist today in Western countries. Without them, no large-scale or even slightly developed society is conceivable. They represent social phenomena that I would describe as “community phenomena”. These only become dominant and can generate a specific type of communist society - or "real socialism" - under very specific conditions. (…) p. 14-16

To feel life, to truly experience it, you must, of course, be in it. But to know it, it is necessary, above all, to move away from it at a sufficient distance. Otherwise, you have no overall vision, you cannot distinguish its essential features, its dynamics, its aims. 397

To enjoy freedom, you need money p. 89

Khrushchev’s perestroika ended without any bloodshed. Khrushchev’s companions abandoned their leader in time and turned Brezhnevists.

The whole problem, currently, is to have a method of understanding, says the Fool. People have information in spades, but they are incapable of extracting truths that matter. They are content to live at a superficial level of very primary observation and generalization. No one is capable of deepening their analysis to the essential mechanisms of what is happening. However, such deepening obeys rules, which are not very complicated. 117

(…) I disagree with the commonly accepted opinion that real communism would be the realization of Marxist ideals and that it would be imposed on the masses, against their will, their desires and their interests, by a handful of people. ideologues resorting to force and lies. Communism is not only a political regime that can be transformed by an order from above, it is a social organization of the population. A Soviet Union was formed, not in accordance with the Marxist project nor at the whim of Marxist ideologues, but by virtue of the objective laws which govern the organization of a large mass of population into a completed social organism. It is the result of a historical creative process in which millions of people took part. (…) p. 13

This way that petty-bourgeois minds confuse their subjective assessments with the objective situation goes so far that the majority of notions used in conversations about social problems have currently lost their scientific character to become simple expressions of estimation. . p. 37

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

The political class belongs to the sphere of community which, I repeat, reached its maximum stage of development in communist society where it became dominant. In Western society, she probably cannot reach this level, but she tends to try. p. 161

A pluralist system under a communist regime is an absurdity. The parties would immediately go to war, and one of them would win (or the country would divide into “independent” states). p. 115

Which means that we are seriously mistaken when we hope to see science play a role as an instrument of progress and civilization.

The intellectual level of Westerners has never been very high. This is still the case today: you don't have to be intelligent to have power. Westerners create computer models, but they don't have scientific models.

The disease of our time is mediocrity.

It follows from what has just been said that communism is neither the product, nor the continuation, nor the outcome of capitalism. They have different origins. It is no coincidence that communism burst onto the scene of history, not in the highly developed West but in a Russia that was backward from a capitalist point of view and highly developed in terms of community phenomena. : centralized and powerful state apparatus, important class of civil servants, masses accustomed to submitting to power, peasant community. By liquidating the weakened classes of landowners and the not yet solid classes of capitalists, the October revolutions were to sweep away the terrain of community relations. It is also not by chance that communism has attracted countries with weak capitalist development. p. 14-16

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