Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922 – 2006)
Famous Russian philosopher, sociologist and writer.
Unlike science, an ideology is constructed of conventional ambiguous expressions, which require interpretation. It is impossible to verify or experimentally confirm an ideological statement, one cannot refute these for they are meaningless. […] While arising, an ideology may have pretensions to be scientific. But having become an ideology, it loses all the major characteristics of science.
None of the Marxist concepts (literally – not a single one!) matches the logical rules of scientific concepts.
I consider him [i.e Stalin] one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality.
One physicist writes a study on microphysics, but another writes a book on the importance of Lenin’s and Engels’ works for the development of physics; one mathematician proves theorems, another publishes demagoguery on ingenious mathematical ideas of classical Marxists.
The oblast head of Church disproved the claim in a party newspaper. At the same time he condemned the president of the US as a warmonger.
For example, if a Communist Party of a certain Western democracy promises to preserve after its seizure of power the positive characteristics of Western democracies (including civil liberties and high living standard) in the country and to avoid the negative characteristics of the Communist (socialist) mode of life, which have occurred and occur in the Soviet Union and the countries of the pro-Soviet block, then only on the assumption of a complete absence of common sense, shocking ignorance in sociology and the complete disavowal of the facts of history is it possible to consider this promise as a contribution to the comprehension of the sociological phenomena.
Although Russia was the first victim of the global Americanisation, one should realise, that the whole Western Europe is affected. The liberal democracy belongs to the past. So does classical Capitalism. We are already situated in a post-democratic era: The new ruling class has realised that one cannot solve the problems of mankind through democracy.
They new the old folk wisdom: what has been built might be really crap and therefore it doesn’t make any sense to dig it, for the smell could make the life really impossible. They regarded Gorbachev exactly that kind of a fool, who had broken the rule.
The members of the commission flew to Partgrad the very next day – it was an unprecendented case in the Soviet Union. During the Brezhnev era, it would have taken a couple of months for all the discussions, after which the commission would have flown for a holiday to the Crimea or Caucasus in a body. And really, why should one fly to a certain Partgrad if everyone knows that all those ‘Lighthouses’ are mere swindle.