Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

The plot was foiled. The young man was hanged, having refused on principle, and despite his mother's entreaties, to ask the tsar for clemency. This event greatly helped to propel Vladimir onto his own revolutionary career. His martyred brother became his hero and the annihilation of tsarism his implacable aim.[17]

The prime source of accumulation was the "scissors" between town and countryside: charging the peasant high prices for manufactured goods while paying him low ones for farm products. Avoiding Preobrazhensky's impolitic term "exploitation," Stalin called this "something on the order of 'tribute,' something on the order of a supertax.

was suspected in certain quarters of informing to the police on people whom he wished to see removed from the scene.

As for the nexus (smychka) between working class and peasantry—the need to preserve which was a fundamental article of faith in the party—there existed, said Stalin, not only a "nexus through textiles" but also a "nexus through metal" or mechanization, and the latter had the advantage that it would ensure the "remaking of the peasant in the spirit of collectivism.

Judging by the pervasiveness of this theme in Djugashvili's early writings, and the way he emphasized it, he was strongly attracted to Marxism's vision of past and present society as a great battleground whereon two hostile forces—bourgeoisie and proletariat—are locked in mortal combat.

The capitalist elements, kulaks included, would naturally resist the offensive in all ways open to them.

Regional and local organs of authority set up on a sovereign basis would only stand in the way of solving these tasks. Hence it was necessary to leave in the hands of the central authority "all functions of importance to the country

All this, combined with adept maneuvering in the intra-party politics of the time, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that Stalin's political fortunes rose at the very congress which listened in hostile silence when he tried to justify his conduct in the Soviet-Polish war.

Hence class struggle, of which the recent emergency measures were an expression, must be seen as a normal phenomenon under the NEP.

This novel furnished inspiration for several generations of Russian radicals. That it furnished inspiration also for Vladimir Ulyanov is well attested to by, among other things, the fact that he entitled his own revolutionary treatise of 1902—the most important of all his works in historical influence—What Is to Be Done?

central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country's advance toward socialism.

He angrily rejected a disparaging remark about the literary quality of Chernyshevsky's work, and confessed that it had influenced him profoundly, particularly when he reread it after his brother's execution: "It captivated my brother, and it captivated me. It made me over completely. . . .

soon after being expelled he caused the expulsion of the other members of his secret socialist group in the seminary by reporting their names to the rector. According to these sources, he admitted his action and justified it to the expelled boys on the ground that they would become good revolutionaries now that they had lost the opportunity for careers as priests.

He went on to explain that "the greatest merit of Chernyshevsky lies not only in showing that any right-minded and truly decent person must be a revolutionary, but also something still more important: he showed what sort of person a revolutionary should be, what rules of conduct he should follow, how he should proceed to his goal, and by what means he should attain it."[18]

The first large-scale party purge of the Soviet period took place during the ensuing months, under the direction of the secretarial trio, and Molotov reported to the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922 that the party's membership had been reduced from 660,000 to about 500,000 through the expulsions and forced resignations that resulted. "Now," he said, "those numerous currents and semi-formed factions do not exist."[369]

Thus in 1905 he opposed the Menshevik tactic of supporting the liberals in a strictly bourgeois-democratic revolution against tsarism, and gravitated to the tactic of telescoping the two stages of revolution under a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

Although further evidence of Djugashvili's involvement is lacking, we do have confirmation that a group of forty or so students was forced to leave the seminary in the fall of 1899 in a manner very strongly suggesting that the school authorities found them to be engaged in forbidden clandestine activities.[

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

was now mainly a question of formalizing the de facto control of the party organization that Stalin had attained. This was done when the Central Committee's organs were re-elected following the Eleventh Congress.

Around 1921, however, their relationship began to show signs of strain. One contributing factor was Lenin's victory at the Tenth Congress and the resulting resolution of the intra-party conflict that had alienated him from Trotsky. These developments cleared the way for a renewal of Lenin's close ties with the man whom Stalin saw as his own arch-enemy; and rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky could not fail to stir resentment in Stalin.

The soul of the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels was the teaching that the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship was the necessary political instrument of a society's transition to socialism and future communism. To be a genuine Marxist it was not enough to accept the theory of the class struggle; one also had to accept the doctrine of proletarian dictatorship as the goal and terminal point of this struggle.

Consequently, it would be in no sense un-Marxist for the party to seize power and rule dictatorially in the interest of building a socialist society in Russia. This was the practical political conclusion implicit in every line of Lenin's seemingly scholastic theoretical treatise on Marxist views about the state.

Stalin was elected a member of the Secretariat and accorded the title "general secretary" in token of his seniority in a new secretarial trio whose two other members were Molotov and Kuibyshev. The base of operations was now securely in his possession.

Later in 1923, he was one of forty-six Bolsheviks of the Left who signed a secret memorandum to the Politburo which spoke of "the ever-increasing, and now scarcely concealed, division of the party between a secretarial hierarchy and 'quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party which does not participate in the common life."[483]