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[...] In Petrograd I could see what was happening to the book trade: the stocks of the bookshops, which had been confiscated, were rotting away in cellars that as often as not were flooded with water in the spring. We were most thankful to the thieves who salvaged a goodly number of books and put t…

[...] Bolshevik thought draws its inspiration from the feeling of possession of the truth. In the eyes of Lenin, of Bukharin, of Preobrazhensky, dialectical materialism is both the law of human thought as well as that of the development of nature and of societies. Bolshevik thinking is grounded in …

Winter was a torture (there is no other word for it) for the townspeople: no heating, no lighting, and the ravages of famine. Children and feeble old folk died in their thousands. Typhus was carried everywhere by lice, and took its frightful toll. All this I saw and lived through, for a great while…

[...] Socialism isn’t only about defending against one’s enemies, against the old world it is opposing; it also has to fight within itself against its own reactionary ferments. A revolution seems monolithic only from a distance; close up it can be compared to a torrent that violently sweeps along b…

[...] From honest dealers in Helsinki we would buy excellent weapons, Mauser pistols in wooden cases which were delivered to us on a quiet sector of the front (quiet because of this minor traffic) fifty or so kilometers from Leningrad. To pay for these useful commodities, we printed whole casefuls …