Quotes About Revolution

Where to Begin?" Printed in Stuttgart in March 1902, under the title What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,

Between 1902 and 1913, according to his official biography, he was arrested eight times, was sent into exile seven times, and escaped from exile six times.[156] The exile from which he did not escape was the one to which he was sentenced in 1913 and from which he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917.

the 1917 Revolution was brought on by a long losing war in which an underequipped and poorly led Russian peasant army suffered an estimated seven million casualties in dead, wounded, and missing.

What Is to Be Done?, which made the Marxist theory of revolution into a theory of how to make a revolution.

classical Marxism proclaimed the imminence of world proletarian revolution, Leninism (or "Marxism-Leninism," as it became known in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death) originated in the proposition that there is no proletarian revolution except through the party.

Lenin had managed to communicate to people who yearned for socialist revolution without seriously expecting it a feeling that such a revolution was a real possibility, and in doing this he was ministering to their deep-seated need for confidence in their own commitment.

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

Its platform, subsequently published abroad, was suppressed inside Russia. Its efforts to arouse worker support by clandestinely distributing such materials as the text of Lenin's testament and by organizing street demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, were foiled by the authorities.

hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.

Breakneck industrialization, with priority for heavy industry, and forcible mass collectivization of the peasantry would be the twin hallmarks of the revolution from above that Stalin inaugurated in 1929.

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.

Although these operations (known among the revolutionaries as "exes") aroused much opposition in the party, especially from the Mensheviks, Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

Thus was Stalin's call for collective farming incorporated into official policy, causing the Fifteenth Congress to be described in later party histories as the "congress of collectivization.

The Mensheviks emerged from the Revolution of 1905 as the dominant Social Democratic faction in Georgia.

Russian Jacobinism.

Given all these conditions, it is not surprising that a section of the intelligentsia grew receptive to the ideology of proletarian socialist revolution being propagated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a number of European countries there existed by this time Social Democratic parties professing Marxism as their program and acting in the name of the industrial working class as their principal constituency.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

The plot was foiled. The young man was hanged, having refused on principle, and despite his mother's entreaties, to ask the tsar for clemency. This event greatly helped to propel Vladimir onto his own revolutionary career. His martyred brother became his hero and the annihilation of tsarism his implacable aim.[17]

Judging by the pervasiveness of this theme in Djugashvili's early writings, and the way he emphasized it, he was strongly attracted to Marxism's vision of past and present society as a great battleground whereon two hostile forces—bourgeoisie and proletariat—are locked in mortal combat.

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

soon after being expelled he caused the expulsion of the other members of his secret socialist group in the seminary by reporting their names to the rector. According to these sources, he admitted his action and justified it to the expelled boys on the ground that they would become good revolutionaries now that they had lost the opportunity for careers as priests.

Thus in 1905 he opposed the Menshevik tactic of supporting the liberals in a strictly bourgeois-democratic revolution against tsarism, and gravitated to the tactic of telescoping the two stages of revolution under a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.