The thirties were the darkest and at the same time the most optimistic period in Soviet history. p. 99 - Alexander Zinoviev

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 Party is the organization of leaders, in the strongest sense of the term and for leaders of all orders. It is, fundamentally, an organ of repression, and not just the place of production of slogans and speeches. Our party is not one, in the sense in which it was understood before the revolution, or in the Western sense of the term. It only has the name. It's not the party, it's the Party. And its role is quite different in the life of society (it is power, privileges). p. 115

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