Quotes from Stephen Kotkin

could serve as a political elixir: everything that went awry could be, and was, blamed on the Jews.

IN 1910, AFTER THEODORE ROOSEVELT met Kaiser Wilhelm II, the former American president (1901–9) confided in his wife, "I'm absolutely certain now, we're all in for it.

Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who handled the disbursements to the Union of Russian People and similar organizations, saw no distinction between the political techniques and social program of the far right—redistribution of private property from plutocrats to the poor—and

The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks.

And yet, within a mere decade of Stolypin's demise, the Georgian-born Russian Social Democrat Iosif "Koba" Jughashvili, a pundit and agitator, would take the place of the sickly Romanov heir and go on to forge a fantastical dictatorial authority far beyond any effective power exercised by imperial Russia's autocratic tsars or Stolypin. Calling that outcome unforeseeable would be an acute understatement.

Predictably, Lenin's socialist opponents—Bundists, Latvian Social Democrats, Mensheviks—denounced the Prague conference for the illegitimate maneuver that it was. Equally predictably, however, their own efforts to answer with their own Party Congress in August 1912 disintegrated into irreconcilable factionalism.

In the event of defeat," he wrote in the February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, "social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable." Durnovó specifically forecast that the gentry's land would be expropriated and that "Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.

Stalin's moods were becoming almost as difficult to parse as the intentions of the Soviet Union's external enemies.

When the irreverent satirists began to mock the new Bolshevik regime, however, Latvian Riflemen in the audience shot up the premises and began to chase Bim and Bom. The audience laughed, assuming it was part of the act. The clowns would be arrested.

to the Georgian, pointed his finger and exclaimed, "The first secretary poses his candidacy to the post of grave digger of the revolution!

Stolypin, frowned on the public "disorder" of political mobilization, and wanted politics to return from the street to the corridors of power.

Stalin was desperately making up spurious arguments, and showed himself to be thin-skinned, an intellectual bully.

Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a "transition to collective forms" of agriculture a matter of "one or two generations.

The Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been widely opposed in the party, of course, but it had quickly proved Lenin right. Lenin again got his way.

The plenum concluded with a tribute dashed off to Stalin in which the participants exclaimed, "we cannot express in words the full force of our love for you," and pledged their readiness to "meet the enemy."4 The officials who made this vow of absolute loyalty did not know it then, but as it turned out, they were the enemy.

Valerian Kuibyshev, head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, blustered to the party organization in his bailiwick in January 1928. He allowed that the market "could be one current, but a Communist and Bolshevik has always been and is able to swim against the current," and concluded that "the will of the party can create miracles . . . and is creating and will create miracles despite all these market phenomena.

When armed squads confiscated eight bulls, seven cows, four calves, three horses, thirty-six tons of wheat, a cart, a threshing machine, and a mill from B. Bondarenko of Aktyubinsk province, while sentencing him to a year in prison, he asked the presiding judge to provide an explanation for the basis of his conviction because he was not guilty of a crime.

War, 46. 267. Bunyan, Intervention, 277

Sergei Nechayev (1847–82), the son of a serf and the founder of the secret society the People's Retaliation, had observed in 1871, "Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.

With his manifold instruments of personal power, he was mercilessly hounding all those who expressed differences of opinion with him, but he was always the victim.

Within days of Lenin's death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin's sacred "behest.

History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.

Beyond the 8.5 million war dead and the nearly 8 million taken prisoner or missing, an influenza epidemic would infect 500 million people globally and kill at least 50 million, fully 3 percent of the global population (some estimates range up to 100 million).155

It was in such a context that Trotsky scorned "papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life," and Lenin