Quotes About Lenin

Around 1921, however, their relationship began to show signs of strain. One contributing factor was Lenin's victory at the Tenth Congress and the resulting resolution of the intra-party conflict that had alienated him from Trotsky. These developments cleared the way for a renewal of Lenin's close ties with the man whom Stalin saw as his own arch-enemy; and rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky could not fail to stir resentment in Stalin.

Consequently, it would be in no sense un-Marxist for the party to seize power and rule dictatorially in the interest of building a socialist society in Russia. This was the practical political conclusion implicit in every line of Lenin's seemingly scholastic theoretical treatise on Marxist views about the state.

To neither of his two commissariats did he give the sustained and imaginative direction that agencies so innovative in design especially called for. The notion of the worker-peasant inspectorate as essentially a public force against "bureaucratism" came from Lenin, and Stalin never seems to have felt at home with

whereas Lenin had envisaged the new Central Committee members as workers, for the most part, Stalin wanted to enlarge the Central Committee with well-disposed apparatchiki so as to increase his own influence within it.

During 1922 events moved swiftly toward a crisis in Lenin's relations with Stalin, who by this time felt sufficiently secure in his power base to assert views and persist in them even if they occasionally ran counter to Lenin's.

that the Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution on unity, drafted by Lenin, which banned factions in the party. Reflecting the competition of "platforms" on the trade union issue, which had divided the party in the pre-congress period, it defined factionalism as "the emergence of groups with special platforms and a certain striving to close ranks and create their own group discipline."[485

Basic Soviet strategy in foreign affairs, under which the Comintern and the Foreign Commissariat operated as two arms of a dual policy, one working to overthrow capitalist governments while the other tried to conduct business with them, was essentially Lenin's creation, as was the notion of a Soviet diplomacy designed to reduce the insecurity of the revolutionary state by aggravating the discords between its enemies.

At the time of Lenin's death there were in the party four different factional groupings with representation on the Politburo.

Lenin added a postscript on January 4, 1923, recommending Stalin's removal from the post of general secretary.

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

Since, moreover, the Bolsheviks were by old habit an intensely argumentative party, given to debating their political issues in ideological terms, an aspiring leader had to be convincing theoretically as well as pragmatically. No matter how competent he might be as a technician of power, he had to prove himself as a political and ideological leader in the Lenin tradition. He had to engage in a contest not simply for power but also for the succession.

Lenin's personal charisma was neither institutionalized in an office of supreme party leadership (as we have already noted, he had held none), nor was it easily transferable to a successor. No one among the leaders of the party succeeded to Lenin's extraordinary authority.

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.

It was the Lenin of kto kogo? As Stalin put it in his speech to the Central Committee plenum of April 1929, when he branded Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the leaders of the "Right deviation" in the party, "The situation is that we live according to Lenin's formula of 'kto kogo': either we shall pin them, the capitalists, to the ground and give them, as Lenin expressed it, final decisive battle, or they will pin our shoulders to the ground.

discrepancy between power and authority thus existed in early post-Lenin Bolshevism. Powerful though he had become in the party, Stalin was not yet widely perceived and accepted as Lenin's successor in the role of supreme leader of the party.

Apart from their attitude toward Lenin, Bolsheviks were not generally inclined to attach much importance to the personal factor in politics. To their Marxist-trained minds, what mainly mattered about a comrade was not his personality but his political beliefs, his ideological commitment, the rightness or wrongness of his positions in party councils.

Two years after his death, by which time Stalin was far along in his march to power, the succession problem was still unresolved. Stalin delivered the political report of the Central Committee before the Fourteenth Congress, appearing in a role that had traditionally been Lenin's and that Zinoviev had taken at the two preceding party congresses. But he was not an acknowledged new supreme leader of the party with authority in any way comparable to Lenin's.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

Socialism, which dates back to 1917, when Lenin founded the world's first socialist state, has had a much shorter shelf life. It too collapsed across the world because the people who lived under it considered it to be a form of slavery.

being sacked. Major's hopes for central regulation withering away echo Lenin, who hoped for a 'withering away' of the Soviet

Killing the private property-that was the center of the Marxist economy and Marxist ideology. That was the center of the Lenin ideology.

There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Why Lenin triumphed, why Nicholas failed, why Alexandra placed the fate of her son, her husband and his empire in the hands of a wandering holy man, why Alexis suffered from hemophilia—these are the true riddles of this historical tale. All of them have answers except, perhaps, the last.

The German leaders, said Winston Churchill, turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.