Quotes from Stephen Kotkin

When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.

For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63

Yevdokimov's photo-album approach to fast-track executions just in case constituted an innovation.

Had Wilhelm II backed off and curbed his dependent Austro-Hungarian ally, Nicholas II would have backed down as well.

Lenin taught us that every party member should be a Chekist, that is, should observe and denounce. . . . If we suffer from anything, it is not denunciations but non-denunciations.

Behind mundane disagreement he saw not legitimate opinion but malevolent forces.

okhranka operatives deemed the far right's leaders "uncultured" and "unreliable" and kept them under close surveillance, with good reason.

he boldly rejected the Bolshevik Lenin's proposal for complete land nationalization as well as a Russian Menshevik call for land municipalization.

There were at least 6,185 summary executions in the Red Terror of 1918—in two months. There had been 6,321 death sentences by Russian courts between 1825 and 1917, not all of them carried out.

Serfdom's abolition in the Caucasus began three years later than in the rest of the Russian empire, in October 1864.

OVER THE MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES from the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia expanded an average of fifty square miles per day.

He deemed the Georgian "an insincere, masked dictator who plays with people.

In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads, representing more capital than any other American asset except land, but instead of the slave-based, cotton-growing South, the industrial North triumphed.

Whoever was at fault, the result was a broken home.37 By 1883, Keke and little Soso began a vagabond existence, moving house at least nine times over the next decade. And that was not the young boy's only misfortune

An estimated 14,000 Muslims were slaughtered, many of them machine-gunned; the city was looted, then burned.

But if he imagined this gift from his enemies had driven a stake through the Testament, he was mistaken. It would never die.

In the two weeks before the first Duma opened, between April 10 and 25, 1906, the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party convoked its 4th Congress under the slogan of "unity.

to raise the cultural level of the laboring masses and rear them in a socialist manner, promote a literature in the local languages, appoint local people who are most closely connected with the proletariat to the Soviet organizations and draw them into the work of administering the territory.

Party thinking equated Bolshevism with the movement of history and thereby made all critics into counterrevolutionaries, even if they were fellow socialists.

Lenin's big gambles—accepting imperial German aid to return to Russia; the coup in Petrograd; the capitulatory separate peace with Germany—had paid off.

The talk around the congress was that "Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Committee."305

Trotsky cut in: "'Collective leadership' is precisely when everyone hinders each other or everyone attacks each other.' (Laughter).

Land redistribution, Jughashvili argued, would facilitate a worker-peasant alliance

A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices.