Maxim Gorky

“ When they see the mighty march of the masses of the people toward freedom and light, dreading a disturbance of their peace, trembling for their position as lords of life, they hide the truth even from one another and console themselves with the spectral hope of defeating justice. They slanderously describe the proletariat as a dark mass of hungry beasts whose one desire is to gorge large quantities of food and who are ready for the sake of a good hunk of bread to destroy everything with which they cannot fill their maw. ”

“ The proletariat is not beaten. Although it has suffered loss. The revolution is strengthened with new hopes and during these days its ranks have been immensely increased. The revolution has gained a great moral victory over the bourgeoisie which now perceives most clearly who it is that is creating anarchy in Russia and with what object it is created, who is struggling against anarchy and with what end - the bourgeoisie perceives that the people is defending that freedom which it also needs, that freedom which the people has bought with its blood, and of which the Government would now rob it. ”

“ In Russia a revolution is bursting into flame, and they slander utterly the Russian proletariat, representing the workman as a mere unconscious elemental force, a barbarous horde, ready to destroy, to wipe out completely all that exists, and incapable of creating anything but anarchy. ”

“ On the streets of Moscow the instinct of self-preservation strove alongside with an awakened consciousness; the first struggled brutally like a wounded animal, while the second embodied in the persons of the revolutionaries, strove heroically like a man inspired by the great fire of the ideal.
"The proletariat is beaten, the revolution is stamped out," shrieks our reactionary press in malignant delight. ”

“ In the eyes of all honest people of the world this man stands as the gloomiest, bloodiest and the most hypocritical phenomenon of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth centuries. He is a manufacturer of corpses, destroyer of life, something more terrible than the plague; he plays with the lives of the Russian people as a blind man at chess. ”

“ As soon as any people wakes up and a struggle for new forms of life ensues, why does the Russian Government send its soldiers to strangle and kill nations striving after freedom a culture, as it does in Persia now? ”

“ You don't know the history or the needs of the Russian people; you don't know anything except that you want peace at any price! Generally speaking you are people with no wills; that is why the writer Leskoff, who was no revolutionary but simply a nationalist, called you "the Slav sweepings" and "the native rubbish."
You who look upon yourselves as "truly Russian men" are that part of the people in whose veins there flows most Mongol blood, and you are saturated with Mongol and Eastern principles, inculcated in your brains by Mongols, and accentuated during centuries, of serfdom. ”

“ Dazzled by the glitter of gold, they slavishly trust in its might, and do not perceive with what steadily increasing brightness burns the great ideal of the union of all men in one comrade-family of free workers. Socialism, the religion of liberty, equality and fraternity, is as unintelligible to them as is music to a man who is deaf and dumb, or poetry to an idiot. ”

“ I have a very high opinion of the intelligence and penetration of the bourgeoisie in the West, and I find it hard to understand how anyone can see a statesman's talent and intellect in a man who has brought his country to ruin and is now selling it by retail; for his proposal to mortgage the Russian railways to foreign capitalists can only be called a case of Turkish policy, which in Russia is not regarded as intelligent even by cretins. ”

“ People set to work with enthusiasm, even fanaticism, but soon cool down, split up into small sects and groups; they have ridiculous disputes with each other, not over the substance of the matter but about mere words. If we examine the shortcomings of the Russian educated classes, we see that they are born of the flesh and blood of the Russian people, but if we look at their merits, then the educated classes, judged by their heroism and the amount of work they have done, constitute a phenomenon quite without parallel in the history of Europe ”

“ Let me point out a non-Russian family which is most harmful for Russia - a family which during centuries has cruelly bled our country, and has thrice in a hundred' years led the country nearly to the brink of national catastrophes. ”

“ It set to work to destroy Moscow by cannon-fire, but, as it matter of fact, the proletariat does not own any real property, and the man who suffered was the bourgeois. Valuing his property more highly than honour and life, and seeing it given over by the Government, together with his life, into the hands of soldiers who were half-drunk and who were irritated by hard service, he suddenly grew wroth and began to build barricades. ”

“ You will see, no doubt, hour this question will be answered by a generation brought up in an atmosphere of "provocations," executions, suicides,, robberies, thefts, under the influence and impression of such grandiose trials as the trials of the commissariat chiefs, the unearthing of the activities of the secret police; under the pressure of general cynicism, of Sadic, sickly cruelty. The new generation is growing up in an atmosphere which poisons one's reason and conscience, and all this has been created by you. ”

“ How can we presume that there can be, a drop of Slav blood in the Russian Czars when generation after generation of them marry German women- Where are the proofs that the Russian people is near and interesting to them, and loved by them? ”

“ And seeing that miracles are out of the question in our day, all reasonable people will at once understand the significance of the part played by the little bourgeois in the Moscow revolution, all will realise of what heroism the Russian people is capable. ”

“ You acknowledge yourself that the Russian "has not a strong will," and I agree with you that a strong will can only be acquired when there exists freedom of activity for man, coupled with definite aims for the future ”

“ There will be much in that revolution that is unhealthy, called forth from the depths of what is of the brute in man, for in the last five years you have done everything to make people lose all idea of the value of their own and other people's lives ”

“ You are far from being terrible and strong men, as it seems to you, when you collect together in a crowd. No; you are miserable, half-sickly people, with the blood of Asiatics and slaves in your veins, poisoning Russia by rotting alive ”

“ Religion and science they employ as instruments for holding you in servitude; they have invented Nationalism and Anti-semitism, venom with which they would poison your faith in the brotherhood of all men; even God exists for the bourgeois merely as a guardian of property. ”

“ First of all, because people recognise the supreme power of a single man, no different from one of themselves, and give him the sovereign right to dispose of their lives, their liberty or property, at his pleasure - it means that they efface themselves, their will and their reason, and bury their talents, so to say. ”

“ General Kazbek, the Commander of Vladikavkaz, tells him in a personal report that he had managed to quell a popular disturbance without a single shot being fired. The "kind" Czar, who loves the Russian people, advised him instructively:-
"One must always shoot; always shoot, general!" ”

“ You are manfully trying to break this net: your enemies are making determined efforts to entangle you till more securely in its meshes, your weapon is the sharp sword of truth, that of your enemies the crooked needle of falsehood. ”

“ Your organisations are weak everywhere; they collapse, and will continue to collapse, because what else can you, Monarchists, do except to arrange "pogroms"? What do you trouble about the disorder that is crushing the Fatherland: ignorance, drunkenness, famine, and brutality all round, which are fostered by you in league with the Government? You are miserable people, badly educated, ignorant. ”

“ Comrades, - The conflict against the mean oppression of poverty is a conflict for the liberation of the world from that net of coarse contradictions in which all men are fiercely and impotently struggling. ”

“ That Russia will live which has already renounced passive submission to another will and to the past, which will go to the West, accept its great experience, its forms of life, and which will live attentively following its work, revering its active Aryan culture which has set as its aim the unification of all mankind in one family. ”

“ There is not less difference between us and the Germans, who will also soon defeat us, and who don't know the disease typhus, which is; so common with us; they have forgotten about it because they live in cleanliness and not in filth, and their peasantry do not starve., There is also a serious difference between us and the French, in whose debt we are up to our ears; but no doubt your Government will betray them at a time when they are pressed hard. ”

“ I Have always written, and do still write, that a passive attitude towards life is harmful, that we must take an active part in it; that we Russians philosophise a lot, and do it ineffectively; we work little and badly. I have written that we must struggle with what the East has grafted on us, and that we shall perish if we do not overcome it.
But, as you see, even the Mongols of Japan and China reorganise their life on an Aryan basis, by adopting the experience gained by Europe ”

“ But our Government is stamped with the habit of arbitrary rule; it denies all laws and is filled with the one great care of securing its own position, which, finding most profitable, it has naturally no desire to abandon. ”

“ Secondly, by giving one man unrestricted freedom to dispose of lives of millions of men you create a kind of God on Earth who is infallible, and give this God, created by yourselves the power to pervert and to revoke the laws of God in Heaven, in Whose exist epee you have such a firm belief. ”

“ Petersburg, governors and other high officials concocted a plot against the people, a plot of which the object was to show that the Russian people was not yet capable of appreciating the blessings of political liberty or of using them in a fitting way. ”

“ During the reign of Nicholas II. as many Russians have perished as in all the wars of the nineteenth century. As a murderer he has become more notorious for his bloodthirstiness than the famous Abdul-Hamid, whose bloody fame your Czar has surpassed. ”

“ Let us take, for instance, your organisations of "truly Russian men." The authorities give you complete freedom of action, but you are unable to form a Party with a clear and definite programme; you have split up into several factions, you accuse each other of having stolen public moneys. In Moscow your business is going from bad to worse ”

“ A country which is all covered with blood and filth, where agents of the police kill Ministers, where thousands of people denounced by agents-provocateurs are sent to the gallows, to hard labour in the mines, or to prison ”

“ When, in good time, the number of the armed insurgents becomes generally known the whole world will ask in amazement how this little band could fight for 15 whole days and nights against thousands of artillerymen, cavalry and infantry. ”

“ Catherine, having killed him and the Czar Ivan, gave the; Russian people into slavery to landowners thousands of Russian peasants fled across the frontier. She invited Germans to come, and settled them on the best lands of the Southern steppes and. ”