Quotes from Donald Rayfield

bad feelings to you personally or the GPU as an institution....

passed the letter to Menzhinsky with his own commentary: We have to take account of such moods in the Central Committee's ruling circles, and pause for thought. It would be a very great political mistake if in principle the party on the question of the GPU were to surrender to the philistines and give

Not all chekisty were men. In the Crimea Stalin's Baku comrade Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Béla Kun, with Lenin's approval, murdered 50,000 White officers who had trusted Commander Frunze's safe conduct. Zemliachka, a Cheka sadist who would live to enjoy a pension, tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces, or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore.

Leonid Krasin, a factory director who became one of Lenin's most persuasive diplomats and ruthless requisitioners, recorded: Lenin has become quite insane and if anyone has influence over him it is only "Comrade Feliks" , an even greater fanatic and, in essence, a cunning piece of work who scares Lenin with counterrevolution and the idea that this will sweep us all away, him first. And Lenin, I am finally convinced, is very much a coward, trembling for his own skin.

Everything might have come right in the course of time. Russian life could have been pulled into order. . . . What bitch woke up Lenin? Who couldn't bear the child sleeping? There is no precise answer to this question. . . . Anyway, he himself probably didn't know, although his supply of vengeance never dried up. . . .

And spiteful in his failure, he immediately started a revolution for all, so that nobody escaped punishment. And our fathers followed him to Golgothas with banners and songs. . . . In Russia you mustn't wake anybody. Naum Korzhavin I have tried, rather than write a new biography of Stalin or another his-tory of the USSR, to examine Stalin's path to total power and the means—and the men—which enabled him to hold on to it.

As the congress began, OGPU found nine copies of an anonymous leaflet addressed to foreign delegates, apparently composed by a group of Soviet writers: . . . We Russian writers remind one of prostitutes in a brothel, with just one difference, that they trade their bodies and we trade our souls; just as they have no way out of the brothel, except death by starvation, neither have we. . . .

Do you understand the game you're playing? Or are you, just like us, prostituting your feelings, conscience, duty? But then we shall never forgive you for that, never ever. . . .30

When the anarchist Giashvili was sentenced to death for exploding a bomb that killed a senior government official, nobody in Tbilisi would act as his executioner. He was reprieved—laudable in a Christian or humanistic culture, but disastrous for a state whose weaknesses were being probed by embittered fanatics

The Bolsheviks attacked the Russian state not because it was oppressive but because it was weak.