Quotes About Stalinism

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

Yet however grotesque Stalinism may seem in retrospect, it also represented an heroic attempt to break the bonds of structural economic backwardness. And its failure stemmed as much from human frailty and folly and from the sheer weight of the problems bequeathed by the past, as from any moral flaws in the Stalinist vision.

Aresztowanie Gomu?ki w latach stalinizmu zmazywa?o przynajmniej cz??ciowo jego wcze?niejsze zbrodnie. To prawda, komunista, odpowiedzialny za powojenne bezece?stwa, ale przecie? sam te? przez komunistów szykanowany. Przez te lata w odosobnieniu znalaz? si? po stronie cierpi?cych Polaków. Na nikogo lepszego wówczas nie mogli liczy?.

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

But even Peter the Great never dreamed of legislation like Stalin's. To turn ordinary children into enemies of their own parents—everything in him revolted against that. The new Children's Law was very clear, though. Any child who discovered counterrevolutionary tendencies in either parent should report him or her. He had grinned at the

wanted to know how five years of Nazism followed by four and a half decades of Stalinism had affected this landscape and the people who inhabited it.

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country's advance toward socialism.

One must, in addition, evince a favorable disposition toward the party regime of the general secretary, usefulness to the Stalin organization.

As in the earlier debate over "socialism in one country," Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called "Stalinism.

This metaphorical depiction of the Soviet situation as a great wrestling match of opposing classes was at once a manifesto of Stalin's Leninism and a clear revelation of his lifelong need to "beat" in the twofold sense of "strike" and "be victorious.

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.

Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the U.S. in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian.

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism. 'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.

London, at the same time, Isaac Deutscher distinguished between 'heretics' and 'renegades' (communists who became anti-Stalinist and those who became anti-communist), in a definition that sought not to cast anathemas but rather to describe a psychological attitude and a mental habitus.

Los regímenes estalinistas tenían que apoyarse en el aparato del Estado (escuelas, policía secreta, etcétera) para imponer el optimismo, pero las democracias capitalistas confían en el mercado para que les haga el trabajo.

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

Komunisti?ko društvo lišava individuu svojih odgovornosti: uvijek su oni ti koji odlu?uju...Istina, svi kao i oni najbli?i Staljinu, davali su zlo?inu suprotan efekat. Mi smo zlo?ine prihvatili kao važne doprinose pobjedi socijalizma. Vjerovali smo kako je sve što ja?a politi?ku mo? komunisti?ke partije u SSSR i svijetu pobjeda za socijalizam. Nikada nismo mogli zamisliti da može biti sukoba u unutrašnjosti komunizma izmedju politike i etike.

Não que a construção do socialismo não possa começar em situações de privação, mas, sem recursos materiais, a tendência será a de que ele seja deturpado e vire a caricatura monstruosa de socialismo conhecida como stalinismo

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even