Quotes from Philip Pomper

In Russia there will always be small groups of people, so dedicated to their ideas and so passionately feeling the misery of their homeland, that they will not think it a sacrifice to die for their cause.

It's impossible to frighten such people….

Ambivalence, I think, is the chief characteristic of my nation. There isn't a Russian executioner who isn't scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner. JOSEPH BRODSKY

That may sound contradictory, but I don't think that we can do without an idea of truth, even if we know that we are generating hypotheses and interpretations. The idea is to inspire the quest, not insist upon an answer or promise an assured outcome. It's a utopian project. The subject is not that important. It's just a pathway into the problems.

Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, by a total concept, a total passion—revolution. In the depths of his being not only in words but in action he has sundered any connection with the civil order and with the entire educated world and with all the laws, proprieties, conventions, and morality of this world. He is—its merciless enemy, and if he continues to live in it, then it is only in order the more certainly to destroy it.

The revolutionary despises any kind of doctrinarism and has rejected peaceful science, leaving it to future generations. He knows only one science—the science of destruction. For this and only for this he now studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, perhaps medicine. For this he studies day and night the living science of people, of the personalities and positions, and all the conditions of the present social structure in every possible stratum.

The goal is the same—the quickest and surest destruction of this foul structure.1 In 1869 Nechaev murdered a member of his own revolutionary cell who tried to defect. He

There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [ Pravda ], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.