Quotes from Stephen Kotkin

The Union of the Russian People helped invent a new style of right-wing politics—novel not just for Russia but for most of the world—a politics in a new key oriented toward the masses, public spaces, and direct action, a fascism avant la lettre.

Some wags surmised the Western powers refrained from unseating the Soviet regime to give socialists around the world more time to see the full folly of their delusions.)

The goal of the cobbler, Jughashvili continued, without mentioning his father, Beso, by name, was to accumulate capital and reopen his own business. But eventually, the "petit-bourgeois" cobbler realized he would never accumulate the capital and was in fact a proletarian. "A change in the consciousness of the cobbler," Jughashvili concluded, "followed a change in his material circumstances.

Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy.

He added that "argumentation by use of force has the same significance as argumentation by use of economic means, and sometimes greater significance, when the market [grain procurements] has been spoiled and they try to turn our entire economic policy onto the rails of capitalism, which we will not do.

Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This

Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers' Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: "knows a foreign language," "uses irony."128

the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. "It wouldn't hurt," he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik's remarks at the congress, "for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.

Pitiless class warfare formed the core of Lenin's thought—the

Notwithstanding such moments of comprehension as Kamenev displayed, the scope of the rural catastrophe was still clouded in Moscow by class-war idées fixes as the regime reflexively labeled the peasants' legitimate grievances "an uprising of kulaks, bandits, and deserters.

Entente hostility toward Soviet Russia, in other words, no more caused Bolshevik Western antagonism than Entente accommodation would have caused a friendly, hands-off Bolshevik disposition.

Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky: