Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

His rebelliousness began to appear in the first of the two schools, flared up strongly soon after he entered the second, and continued to develop. By the time he left the seminary in 1899 he was a committed revolutionary, in revolt against that great punitive system of paternalistic authority known as tsarism.

Since then the Revolution had gone through a first period of utter isolation and a second period of open war with the Entente, and now had entered a third period of being not only recognized abroad but even a little feared.

Lenin's personal charisma was neither institutionalized in an office of supreme party leadership (as we have already noted, he had held none), nor was it easily transferable to a successor. No one among the leaders of the party succeeded to Lenin's extraordinary authority.

As in the earlier debate over "socialism in one country," Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called "Stalinism.

As he went out into the world, writes Iremashvili, he took with him "a grim and bitter hatred against the school administration, the bourgeoisie, and all that existed in the country and represented tsarism.

socialist movement via the Third International,

It was the Lenin of kto kogo? As Stalin put it in his speech to the Central Committee plenum of April 1929, when he branded Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the leaders of the "Right deviation" in the party, "The situation is that we live according to Lenin's formula of 'kto kogo': either we shall pin them, the capitalists, to the ground and give them, as Lenin expressed it, final decisive battle, or they will pin our shoulders to the ground.

discrepancy between power and authority thus existed in early post-Lenin Bolshevism. Powerful though he had become in the party, Stalin was not yet widely perceived and accepted as Lenin's successor in the role of supreme leader of the party.

This metaphorical depiction of the Soviet situation as a great wrestling match of opposing classes was at once a manifesto of Stalin's Leninism and a clear revelation of his lifelong need to "beat" in the twofold sense of "strike" and "be victorious.

Paraphrasing the well-known words of Luther, Russia might say: "Here I stand, on the borderline between the old capitalist and the new socialist worlds. Here, on this borderline, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasantry of the East in order to smash the old world. "May the god of history help me.

Lastly, as a speaker and writer he was the foremost representative and personal symbol of the regime in its relations with its own people and the outside world.

Who will establish himself finally in the Caucasus, who will use the oil and the extremely important roads leading to the heart of Asia, the Revolution or the Entente—that is the whole question.[385]

The Reds' Crimean victory of mid-November 1920 over the White army led by Baron Pyotr Wrangel marked the effective ending of the Civil War.

Earlier in the year, Trotsky had been shipped into exile in Turkey. Organized opposition was now at an end. The struggle for leadership was over, and Stalin was the victor. As if to mark this fact and formalize the outcome, his fiftieth birthday, on December 21, 1929, was officially celebrated with great fanfare. The party, over which the Stalin faction reigned supreme, saluted him on that occasion as Lenin's successor—the new vozhd'.

A knowledge of the fundamentals of Marxism and the ability to explain them to ordinary workers were Djugashvili's chief stock-in-trade as a professional revolutionary.

Apart from their attitude toward Lenin, Bolsheviks were not generally inclined to attach much importance to the personal factor in politics. To their Marxist-trained minds, what mainly mattered about a comrade was not his personality but his political beliefs, his ideological commitment, the rightness or wrongness of his positions in party councils.

Ulyanov moved to Petersburg in 1893,

Two years after his death, by which time Stalin was far along in his march to power, the succession problem was still unresolved. Stalin delivered the political report of the Central Committee before the Fourteenth Congress, appearing in a role that had traditionally been Lenin's and that Zinoviev had taken at the two preceding party congresses. But he was not an acknowledged new supreme leader of the party with authority in any way comparable to Lenin's.

What "complete victory" really meant in Leninist thinking, it now transpired, was not the complete building of socialism in the USSR; it was the safety of Soviet socialism from external danger, from military intervention by the hostile capitalist encirclement.

July 1900, several months after completing the term of exile, he went abroad again and entered the recently founded Russian Social Democratic Workers' party's leadership as one of the editors of Iskra (The Spark)—a new foreign-based party organ that he himself had done much to organize.

For that, the proletariat must be victorious "at least in several other countries."[587] Only in the further progress of world revolution lay final security—and in that sense final victory—for the Soviet Revolution.

innovation lay in asserting the autonomy of the Russian national revolutionary process, in making the construction of a socialist society at home independent of the international revolution.

The First Decade

Ulyanov's colossal capacity for work, combined with his powerful and prolific pen, brought him to the fore as a pamphleteer for revolutionary Marxism during that time of controversy between the populist and Marxist branches of the socialist movement, and between militants and moderates within the Marxist branch.