Sergei, what are you checking for?” I asked. At first I thought it was funny. He moved quickly and efficiently, making a clean sweep of each room with me trailing behind him. “I am checking to make sure we are alone,” he informed me. “You could be spy.” “Sergei, I’m not a spy. There is no one here in my apartment besides you and me. You know where I work.” I tried to assure him, but I didn’t know what else I could do to convince him otherwise.

Why are you raising such a fuss? I'll come and shut down your reactor with my ass alone.

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.

Как пишет в своих дневниках тот же Нагибин, автор «Председателя», настоящей истории не существует, от нее остаются только те легенды, которые придумывают писатели и киношники. Наверное, потому даже в 2014 году молодежь, которая и не жила в СССР, мечтает о возврате к нему – она знает о нем по сказочным фильмам, которые обитатели этого Дома творчества сочиняли и снимали для Политбюро КПСС, а реальный СССР оставался за экраном и за этим зеленым забором.

Still other rumors held that the ultimate aim of Bolshevik policy, seen in the combination of unveiling and collectivization, was to have all women held in common. In the kolkhoz, peasants ware warned, men and women slept together under giant blanket, and wives became common property.

Even under Stalin, Soviet state power, acting through law and the courts, confronted serious limits in its efforts to govern, much less transform, its colonial Central Asian periphery.

When agents of the Turkmen secret police came up short in arrests of counterrevolutionaries in 1937-38, they filled their quota by going to the Ashgabat marketplace and rounding up all men who wore beards, on theory that they were likely to be mullahs.

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images.

Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops. 'Will you,' the asked, 'promise to divide the estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?''Only over my dead body,' responded Kaledin. A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains. And the Cossack movement was no more...

Stalin scribbled on an intelligence report predicting that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union in June 1941: 'You can send your "source" to his f*cking mother. This is disinformation.