Quotes About Bolshevik

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

The Russian delegation, led by Maxim Litvinov, proposed complete and immediate disarmament for everybody; this was rejected out of hand as a Bolshevik trick.

Nobody is born a Bolshevik. It has to be learned. And it cannot be learned solely from books either. It is learned, over a long time, by a combination of field work, struggle, personal sacrifices, tests, study, and discussion. The making of a Bolshevik is a long, drawn-out process. But in compensation, when you get a Bolshevik, you have got something. When you get enough of them you can do anything you want to do, including making a revolution.

La politique [de la dictature bolchévik] n'est qu'une variante du communisme de guerre de 1920-1921 - avec de plus en plus de guerre (de répression armée) et de moins en moins de communisme. Son égalité est celle d'un pénitencier, sa liberté celle d'un groupe de forçats enchaînés. Pas étonnant que les bolcheviks affirment que la liberté est un préjugé bourgeois.

Djugashvili had furnished evidence in writing of the theoretical learning that he was to display in the Baku prison. In a series of articles published in Bolshevik newspapers in Tiflis under the general title Anarchism or Socialism?, he defended Marxism against critical attacks that were being leveled against it by Georgian followers of the Russian anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin.

how did he come to be elevated to membership of the Bolshevik Central Committee?

This was Lenin's doing. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

when the Bolshevik faction was recast as a separate party at the Prague conference in 1912, the Central Committee, now all-Bolshevik in composition, not only co-opted Stalin but also elected him as one of the four members of a "Russian Bureau" for direction of party activities inside Russia.

During a few years of unpeaceful factional coexistence there were efforts, sponsored by Trotsky among others, toward unification. The split became formal and irrevocable in 1912 when Lenin called an all-Bolshevik meeting in Prague, where his faction constituted itself the "Russian Social Democratic Workers' party (Bolshevik).

But to be a Bolshevik in the early years was not so much to accept a particular set of beliefs as it was to gravitate into the orbit of Lenin as a political mentor, revolutionary strategist, and personality.

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

One of the most notorious was a raid on the Tiflis State Bank in June 1907, which netted a huge sum of money for the Bolshevik treasury.

In these early writings, as it turned out, Plekhanov was laying the theoretical foundations not of the Russian Marxist political movement as a whole but of its Menshevik wing. The opposing, Bolshevik, wing, of which Lenin became leader, showed the influence of some of the very ideas Plekhanov was attacking. But not until much later did all this become clear.

The one kind of organizing activity that really engaged his interest and aroused his effort was "organizational work" in the special Bolshevik sense of personnel placement.

But the Stalin school of organizational work differed from the Sverdlov in one fundamental aspect that Stalin did not mention: it applied a self-serving test in selecting candidates for advancement in the party hierarchy. No longer did it suffice to give good indication that one was a person of ability, energy, and devotion to the Bolshevik cause.

Emboldened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and tired of endless war and shortages, some 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January 1918, demanding peace, new rights for labor, and a "people's republic.

In 1917 there was not a single Bolshevik who considered possible the realization of a socialist society in a single country, and least of all in Russia.

wrote that freedom of the press "is a deception." He mocked freedom of assembly as a "hollow phrase." As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than "a machine for the suppression of the working class." In the Bolshevik imagination, the press could be free, and public institutions could be fair, only once they were controlled by the working class—via the party.

Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive.

This was a revolution even more radical than the 1917 Bolshevik event, said Rieff. For the first time, humankind was seeking to create a civilization based on the negation of any binding transcendent order.

The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's Nazi Party, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter, and America's periodic mob uprisings, from Shays' Rebellion to today's dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America. And

The vote for the Constituent Assembly showed that if a determined leader such as Kerensky or Kornilov decided to rally patriotic feeling across the country, that feeling could turn against the German invader as well as Lenin's Bolshevik accomplices

A Bolshevik-sponsored resolution to renounce the Constituent Assembly's legislative powers was voted upon and defeated, with every Bolshevik deputy voting in favor. The Bolsheviks then staged a walkout

with the Bolshevik-dominated soviets around the country as their tool for enforcement—the first true totalitarian regime in history.