Quotes from Arthur Herman

In fact, it was Lenin and Trotsky who set up the totalitarian apparatus Stalin would use to impose his one-man rule—and they knew exactly what it would be used to do.

It was Lenin, not Stalin, who turned his utopian dream of a new Communist global order into a living nightmare.

Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is advancing, and the fight is to the death."3

If there is any single lesson to be drawn from this book, it is that utopian dreamers in power tend to breed disaster. But not always, and not forever.

William Jennings Bryan, told the president that "the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy . . . that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion." It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, "among the Immortals.

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight"—a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

peace without victory for the right; a peace designed to let wrong triumph; a peace championed in neutral countries by the apostles of timidity and greed.

Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled "Theses on the Constituent Assembly." It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, "a death sentence on the Assembly.

Tauride Palace, where "the entire square of Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, field kitchens . . . Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell-mell."5

Wilson was raising America up as the new global colossus based on its moral authority as a universal nation.

A Bolshevik-sponsored resolution to renounce the Constituent Assembly's legislative powers was voted upon and defeated, with every Bolshevik deputy voting in favor. The Bolsheviks then staged a walkout

Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides were drawn into a battle of attrition on a scale so immense that neither Germany nor France (nor even its ally Great Britain) could ever look on the war, or even the nature of war itself, the same way again.

The war was a disease that all the Great Powers of Europe had carried in their political DNA, as it were. Now it was up to America, and Woodrow Wilson, to point the way to the cure.

We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution," Trotsky said. "We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.

the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia's hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia's iron and 60 percent of its steel.

on the basis of his speech, it would be able to keep all its conquests, using the ones it didn't want as bargaining chips in a final peace settlement brokered by Wilson and the United States.

By the winter of 1916, German civilians were starving, even starving to death. Unless the war ended very soon, Germany faced catastrophe even if not a single Allied soldier advanced another step.

No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

In my view the end of the war will be unforeseeable because—despite all that can be said to the contrary—the power and resources of the United States are very great."36

now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.

A steady flow of loans from the leading banks on Wall Street, led by J.P. Morgan, had enabled the British, French, and Russians to purchase what they needed to sustain the war effort as their gold reserves dwindled from larger and larger war purchases.

there was no Russian army anymore to fight. "They have voted with their feet by running away," Lenin said sardonically.

Lenin's urging, had repudiated the entirety of Russia's foreign debt, from both the war and before the war: almost nine billion dollars

When, two years later, the Paris Peace Conference wrapped itself around the principle of self-determination, it was automatically assumed that the principle posed no threat to the existing colonial empires of the victorious powers—the United States included.