Quotes About Lenin

Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(1075)

He had quoted Lenin: 'He who controls Berlin, controls Germany; and who controls Germany, controls Europe.

They all spoke some German, having been living in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. Lenin himself spoke it well. He was a remarkable linguist, Walter learned. He was fluent in French, spoke passable English, and read Aristotle in ancient Greek. Lenin's idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.

Lenin también ha anunciado una jornada de ocho horas para los trabajadores y educación universal y gratuita para sus hijos.

Whatever else Lenin might have done—and it was difficult to separate the truth from the conservative propaganda—at least, Billy thought, he was serious about educating Russian children. On

Sin embargo, Russell dejó muy claro que los bolcheviques eran totalmente antidemocráticos. La dictadura del proletariado era una verdadera dictadura, dijo, pero los gobernantes eran intelectuales de clase media como Lenin y Trotski, que solo permitían la ayuda de los proletarios que estaban de acuerdo con sus opiniones

Lenin ha trasladado su gobierno de Petrogrado a Moscú

when he heard that the Soviet Western Army Group had been encircled by the Germans, he said: 'Everything's lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we've fucked it up.' Then

The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible. By gaining democratic freedoms the working masses come to power.

For in public life you aren't free to act on your inclinations or even your principles: in order to acquire power you have to forfeit free-will, which seems rather paradoxical. And how much more so must it be in a dictatorship! A man like Lenin must have about as much choice and freedom of action as the topmost acrobat in a human pyramid

Within a year or two of Lenin's death he was clearly the party's boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

This same conviction that one has grasped the ultimate political truth and that all must now accept it likewise characterized Lenin's thought and Soviet imperialism during its entire seventy-year course. And it appears again in our own time in the doctrines of European Union, which finds no satisfaction in the rule of one nation, but seeks constantly to impose an ever-greater uniformity on all nations in accordance with the political truths its bureaucrats regard as universally evident.

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were 'historically obsolete' and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.

Lenin was worried over Georgian response to sovietization and also over reaction in the international socialist movement to the spectacle of Soviet overthrow of a Social Democratic government.

Lenin was taking account of this ingrained assumption when he wrote in the postscript to the testament that the question of Stalin's personal qualities "may seem an insignificant trifle." And he was taking issue with it when he went on to contend that in this instance the personality trifle might prove of decisive historical significance.

Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin's personality very much mattered.

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

In the Marxist-populist debates of the nineties Lenin trained his polemical fire upon his populist contemporaries; he did not attack the early Russian populism of Chernyshevsky and his generation.

The internal developmental process was always connected in Lenin's mind with external events, in particular with the prospects of assistance resulting from worker revolutions in other countries. "The complete victory of socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country," he said on November 8, 1918.

The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats, a pamphlet written in Siberia in 1897 for uncensored publication abroad and, appropriately, the first of his writings to appear under the name "Lenin.