Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

Openly political socialist writings, not legally publishable under then-prevailing censorship practices, would either be published abroad and smuggled back into Russia or, as in this instance, duplicated and circulated clandestinely (a forerunner of the present-day samizdat, or "self-publishing," as the circulation of uncensored writings in typescript is called in Soviet Russia).

On February 15, 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia.

Moscow sought to camouflage its Georgian operation from the international public—and the Soviet public as well—by presenting it as an intervention in an Armenian-Georgian conflict during which internal revolutionary changes happened to occur.

Djugashvili had furnished evidence in writing of the theoretical learning that he was to display in the Baku prison. In a series of articles published in Bolshevik newspapers in Tiflis under the general title Anarchism or Socialism?, he defended Marxism against critical attacks that were being leveled against it by Georgian followers of the Russian anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin.

Lenin was worried over Georgian response to sovietization and also over reaction in the international socialist movement to the spectacle of Soviet overthrow of a Social Democratic government.

Some have suggested that in using the latter his inspiration may have been the Lena, a river in eastern Siberia.

The first version of the articles, published in mid-1906, was followed by an expanded second version that appeared in late 1906 and early 1907 but remained incomplete owing to Djugashvili's departure for the London congress in April and his subsequent move from Tiflis to Baku.

The expanded version takes up nearly eighty pages in Volume I of his collected works.

The three sections that he completed deal respectively with dialectics, materialism, and the theory of socialism, along with the anarchist criticisms of Marxism on all three counts. To expound Marxism, he explained at the start of the first section, one must first of all expound dialectical materialism, for "Marxism is not only a theory of socialism; it is an entire world-view, a philosophical system from which Marx's proletarian socialism flows logically.

His arduous revolutionary career was not, however, a distinguished one. For upwards of a decade he remained a provincial revolutionary operating in his native Transcaucasus. He had no dramatic anti-tsarist exploits to his credit, and prior to 1913 he contributed no writings that helped shape Bolshevism as an ideological current. He was one of the party's practical workers—an organizer, conspirator, propagandist, and journalist.

But it was the inspirational power of his pamphlet of 1902 that elevated him in the eyes of many and made him the central figure of an actual movement.

The point is that the mind was philosophically awakened, that it felt the need for a coherent overall philosophical image of the world. To young Djugashvili, it was quite evidently a mark of Marxism's special strength as a socialist ideology that it had dialectical materialism—"an entire world-view"—as its matrix.

Lenin was taking account of this ingrained assumption when he wrote in the postscript to the testament that the question of Stalin's personal qualities "may seem an insignificant trifle." And he was taking issue with it when he went on to contend that in this instance the personality trifle might prove of decisive historical significance.

The People's Will tradition of conspiratorial terrorism, which still had some support, was only one of several trends among the populist groups that finally united to form the peasant-based party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (SR's) in 1901–2.

In the ensuing "higher phase" of communist society, which became known among Marxists as "communism" or "full communism," the modern productive powers that had been developed but fettered by capitalism would be completely liberated, material plenty would be achieved, people would be remunerated according to need, and government in the old repressive sense would cease to exist.[570]

Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin's personality very much mattered.

how did he come to be elevated to membership of the Bolshevik Central Committee?

Such was classical Marxism's prospectus for the post-revolutionary future. Leninist Marxism's innovation was to interpose—for a backward country like Russia—a whole historical epoch between the proletarian revolution and the advent of socialism.

This was Lenin's doing. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

Charismatic authority, which Max Weber contrasts with "traditional" and "rational-legal" types of authority, is described by him as repudiating the past and representing a "specifically revolutionary force.

In the Marxist-populist debates of the nineties Lenin trained his polemical fire upon his populist contemporaries; he did not attack the early Russian populism of Chernyshevsky and his generation.

comes into the world proclaiming the need for and possibility of profound change.

Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, "Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

The classical manifestation is the outlook of the religious prophet who says, "It is written . . ., but I say unto you. . . ." Weber's implication is that charismatic authority occurs in the context of a social movement that may arise outside of and in any event is in some manner opposed to the existing order—a radical movement, be it of religious, political, cultural, or other complexion.