Quotes from Stephen Kotkin

His stance was denounced as un-Marxist—indeed, as Blanquist, after the Frenchman Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), who had dismissed the efficacy of popular movements in favor of revolution by a small group via a temporary dictatorship using force.

Lenin suggested that all peasants be compelled to deliver grain by name, and that those who failed to do so "be shot on the spot.

It is hard to know which threatened the army more: the primitive material base or the paranoid class politics.

Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin's grip. Out of the business directorate he and his functionaries carved out a separate entity named the "secret department," which took charge of denunciations and investigations, the party archives, and the contacts with the secret police.

According to the Bolshevik decree, the repressions were "of a temporary nature and will be removed by a special degree just as soon as normal conditions are reestablished," but, of course, "normal" conditions never returned.63

The fundamental fact about him was that he viewed the world through Marxism.

From the point of view of the benefits to the revolution, [we decided] to allow voting only by those who are the genuine party guard.

Even Stalin's absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity.

Lenin loved people only "in general," the self-exiled writer Maxim Gorky nicely summarized in a short book in 1924. "His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.

For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.'"366

Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.

What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.

If Mephistopheles climbed up the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?" huffed a newspaper of Germany's outflanked liberals.

Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions. Martov's majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).

In other words, the Germans were continuing to place a large bet on Bolshevism, while at the same time containing it and extracting advantage.

Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed "firm authority.

He remembered perceived slights, something of a cliche in the blood-feud Caucasus culture but also common among narcissists (another word for many a professional revolutionary).

The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water. In winter, the Cheka was said to pour water over naked prisoners, creating ice statues, while some prisoners were said to have their necks twisted to such a degree their heads came off.107 True or not, such tales contributed to the Cheka mystique.

In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary who would not meet Lenin for three more years, condemned his vision of organization as "military ultra-centralism." Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes—suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition.

Scholars who write of Moscow facing an "uncooperative world economy" have it exactly backward.

More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being.

This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all."47

If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow.

Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were "under the sway" of the kulaks.144