Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

What the "one country" idea meant to Stalin, as became quite clear from his many speeches of the middle twenties, was that Russia, which had shown the world the way to proletarian revolution, would now be able, with or without help from outside, at the cost of great exertions, to accomplish the second historic feat of constructing a full socialist society.

But to be a Bolshevik in the early years was not so much to accept a particular set of beliefs as it was to gravitate into the orbit of Lenin as a political mentor, revolutionary strategist, and personality.

Not he but Trotsky had risen to the heights of glory as Lenin's right-hand man in the Revolution and the Civil War.

Where to Begin?" Printed in Stuttgart in March 1902, under the title What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,

In deviation from the historic pattern of Russian autocracy, the Soviet Russian state arose as a novel form of party rule.

Between 1902 and 1913, according to his official biography, he was arrested eight times, was sent into exile seven times, and escaped from exile six times.[156] The exile from which he did not escape was the one to which he was sentenced in 1913 and from which he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917.

the revolutionary party dictatorship had in Lenin an acknowledged individual supreme leader of such pre-eminence that it could properly be described as a "Lenin regime.

the 1917 Revolution was brought on by a long losing war in which an underequipped and poorly led Russian peasant army suffered an estimated seven million casualties in dead, wounded, and missing.

Political power in the one-party system was vested in collective bodies such as the party congress, which met annually in the early years, and its elected interim surrogate, the Central Committee.

it was the higher party organs, notably the Central Committee and its subcommittee, the Politburo, that decided Soviet policy in both internal and external affairs, and the government evolved as the party's main executive agency.

Since the party was the ruling political authority in the Soviet state, it was not as chief of government but as head of the party that Lenin acted as supreme leader.

The duty of Social Democracy was to influence the will of nations to arrange their affairs in the manner best corresponding to the interests of the proletariat.

Since Lenin wrote as he spoke, his political writings had something of the compelling quality of his political speeches.

It has been suggested, by Trotsky for one, that Djugashvili began his activities as a Menshevik and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks only on the eve of 1905, after much hesitation.[

What Is to Be Done?, which made the Marxist theory of revolution into a theory of how to make a revolution.

The ugly wrangle over the testament must have dimmed the satisfaction that Stalin derived from his political triumph at this time over the united opposition.

Stalin's whole mode of being in the world militated against the renunciation of the idea of a new revolutionary period. The perspective of an ever-diminishing internal class struggle as the right way to socialism was totally alien to his makeup. Fighting, struggle and conquest were what he lived for as a Marxist and a Leninist. Socialism had always meant to him a gospel of class war and it still did, whatever Lenin might have said toward the end about civil peace and reformism.

The point is that the powers on which he chiefly relied in exercising this forceful individual leadership were his powers of persuasion.

classical Marxism proclaimed the imminence of world proletarian revolution, Leninism (or "Marxism-Leninism," as it became known in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death) originated in the proposition that there is no proletarian revolution except through the party.

Lenin had managed to communicate to people who yearned for socialist revolution without seriously expecting it a feeling that such a revolution was a real possibility, and in doing this he was ministering to their deep-seated need for confidence in their own commitment.

Marxism and the National Question was basically Stalin's, and the collaboration with Lenin that underlay it seems to have been mutually beneficial.

But what does building socialism mean if we translate this formula into concrete class language? Building socialism in the USSR means overcoming our Soviet bourgeoisie by our own forces in the course of a struggle."[

In the closing period of the World War, according to Trotsky, it took Lenin a full year to secure agreement to his proposal to change the official name of the party from "Social Democratic" to "Communist" as a means of making an organizational break with Social Democratic Marxism on an international scale.[67

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.