Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes & Sayings

Party-mindedness" was "an almost mystical concept," explained Kopelev. "The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life." As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but "someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong - even though it's wrong all the time." Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: "We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut."2 Nadya — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors - and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Twenties, served as his judge in 1937 and even denounced a — Simon Sebag Montefiore

spoken to Malamore like this, ever. He wheeled around towards Dirlewanger, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

What's important is not who YOU love but WHO loves you. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Once in power, Stalin's campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all - particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth - the relationship of one people and their God. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Love is a question of geography. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Edith Wharton with the death penalty — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Every love story is a requiem. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

The formation of Stalin's character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Sex fills a few hours of our lives yet those precious minutes count for more than months and years — Simon Sebag Montefiore

No, that's not the style of these people,' explained Maxy. 'You shouldn't think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin's court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and the authority of the eternal yesterday. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The happiness of children is based on their ignorance of what their parents are really thinking — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ's name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre. Next morning, to Tancred's fury, Raymond's men nervously climbed onto the roof of al-Aqsa, surprised the huddled Muslims and beheaded the men and women in another spasm of killing. Some of the Muslims leaped to their deaths. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed, hobbits with almost supernatural powers. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice - in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Love was not thunderbolts but a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The bedroom is the one place you can truly be yourself. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Young Stalin Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Its heart was the alliance between the Romanovs and the nobility who needed royal support to control their estates. Serfdom was the foundation of this partnership. The ideal of autocracy was in practice a deal whereby the Romanovs enjoyed absolute power and delivered imperial glory while the nobility ruled their estates unchallenged. The — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The language of these Soviet show trials ... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which 'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.' All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two 'terrorists' was a 'conspiracy' ... — Simon Sebag Montefiore

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon — Simon Sebag Montefiore

At Peter's court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I'm a Russian. Without the Motherland, I'd be nothing. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as "Little Fathers." They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant "children": "the tsar is good," peasants said, "the nobles are wicked. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was "waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross." On 28 March 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.f — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers. At — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city's asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience - the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR's own espionage that led to the success of Hitler's 1941 surprise attack - was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were "a sort of military-religious order." When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him "a devout knight of the proletariat." Stalin's "order of sword-bearers" resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages - and the Middle East. They — Simon Sebag Montefiore

In the midst of Our great grief,' announced Alexander III, 'the voice of God bids Us to stand staunchly for government relying on God's design with faith in the truth of autocratic power. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Heartbreak is an agonizing disease that you're delighted to have — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Iraq was already in the grip of a bloody insurgency against British rule. Churchill therefore called a conference in Cairo to hand over a certain amount of power to Arab rulers under British influence. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

That doesn't matter. Gorky's a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party," replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated." He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: "You rough fellows do not realize what great work you're doing!"4 Yagoda, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Is there any greater blessing than to love and be loved. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Party justified its "dictatorship" through purity of faith. Their Scriptures were the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, regarded as a "scientific" truth. Since ideology was so important, every leader had to be - or seem to be - an expert on Marxism-Leninism, so that these ruffians spent their weary nights studying, to improve their esoteric credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: "Polichka my darling . . . reading Marxist classics is very necessary . . . You must read some more of Lenin's works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin's . . . I so want to see you. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

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 — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

It seems that Russia today - dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror - is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Necessity is very often the mother of romance. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The greatest privilege of childhood is to live totally in the present. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Notes on Names, Transliterations and Titles This book inevitably contains a challenging diversity of names, languages and questions of transliteration. It is for general readers, so my policy is to use the most accessible and familiar names. I apologize to purists who are offended by these decisions. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth's surface - and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov's blood. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The discipline that aims to be objective and scientific can be used to rationalize religious-ethnic prejudiced and justify imperial ambitions. Israelis, Palestinians and the evangelical imperialists of nineteenth century have all been guilty of commandeering the same events and assigning them contradictory meanings and facts. — Simon Sebag Montefiore