Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore

the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today. Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian.

How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.

He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman.

When Sagirashvili accused him of propagating anti-Menshevik lies in his Pravda, 'he would grin in a seemingly good-natured way' and explain, in a pre-Orwellian dictum, that a 'lie always has a stronger effect than the truth. The main thing is to

1847, the Emperor's favourite, but: the Preobrazhensky Regiment... got totally drunk. The Pavlovsky, our revolutionary buttress, also couldn't resist. We sent guards from other picked units - all got utterly drunk. We posted guards from the Regimental Committees - they succumbed as well. We despatched armoured cars to drive away the crowd, but after a while they also began to weave suspiciously. When evening came, a violent bacchanalia overflowed.

Exasperated, Antonov-Ovseenko called the Petrograd Fire Brigade. 'We tried flooding the cellars with water - but the firemen ... got drunk instead.' The Commissars started smashing the bottles in Palace Square, but 'the crowd drank from the gutters. The drunken ecstasy infected the entire city.

Commissar for Justice?' Isaak Shteinberg, a Left-SR, challenged Lenin. 'Let's honestly call it the Commissariat of Social Annihilation!' 'Well said!' replied Lenin. 'That's exactly how it's going to be!

We must put an end once and for all,' said Trotsky, 'to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.

The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for non-existent traitors.

institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervour.

On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500 pounds of explosives in the basement.23

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.

La guerra, explicaba Napoleón, no era «un arte difícil», sino «una cuestión de ocultar el miedo el mayor tiempo posible. Solo de ese modo se logra intimidar al enemigo y el éxito está fuera de dudas».

It was not the lover she regretted,' wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. 'It was the friend.

Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: "Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I'm in some sort of destroyed city and I can't find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM..."1

Los hombres hacen su propia historia, pero no la hacen a capricho; no la hacen en las circunstancias que ellos mismos eligen, sino en unas circunstancias que ya existen, dadas y transmitidas por el pasado».

the often bizarre, daft and self-defeating trajectory of the last Romanovs can be understood only through their ideology: sacred autocracy.

El contrato que unía al zar con su pueblo era propio de una Rusia primitiva de campesinos y nobles, pero guarda cierta semejanza con el del Kremlin del siglo XXI: gloria en el exterior y seguridad en el interior a cambio del dominio de un solo hombre y de sus cortesanos, y del enriquecimiento casi ilimitado de uno y de otros.

The only man to shake hands with Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Roosevelt and Churchill, Molotov was Stalin's closest ally. Nicknamed "Stone-Arse" for his indefatigable work rate, Molotov liked to correct people ponderously and tell

Amos Oz, the late Jerusalemite writer, offered this droll solution: 'We should remove every stone of the Holy Sites and transport them to Scandinavia for a hundred years and not return them until everyone has learned to live together in Jerusalem.

I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don't let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.

In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these - and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.

Mi pisci imamo neku tajnu koja nas održava u životu i daje nam nadu, mada znamo da to što pišemo nikad ne?emo mo?i da objavimo. Isak Babelj radi na ne?emu tajnom, Miša Bulgakov piše roman o ?avolu u Moskvi. Ali niko ih nikad ne?e ?itati. Niko ni mene ne?e ?itati.