Quotes About Bolsheviks

It is a race now whether the Bolsheviks double-cross the Americans, or the Americans the English – because they are certainly not very united – or whether the English double-cross both the others

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.

The trials continued week after week, until nearly all the old Bolsheviks who had formed the party during and after the October Revolution had been liquidated. In fact, of the nearly two thousand delegates to the 1934 party congress, half were arrested and many sent to the firing squad. The military fared no better. Three out of five field marshals were arrested, tried, and executed, as well as thousands of lesser grade officers.

The great American government, with its spirit of free enterprise, had imposed communism on the Native Peoples, and like the system the Bolsheviks had imposed on the Soviet Union, it had yielded the same harvest. The once-proud native people learned to accept government handouts, then to rely upon them. The subsequent loss of pride, self-reliance, and initiative led inevitably to the current plague of alcoholism, obesity, and hopelessness infecting modern tribal societies.

Thus the Bolsheviks who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church's saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

Mais les dogmes bolcheviks et l'étatisme communiste ont constitué un obstacle fatal aux activités créatrices du peuple. La caractéristique fondamentale de la psychologie bolchevik était sa méfiance envers les masses.

It has been suggested, by Trotsky for one, that Djugashvili began his activities as a Menshevik and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks only on the eve of 1905, after much hesitation.[

One factor in their success was the vigor with which they adopted the general Menshevik-favored tactic of participating in the elections for the first Duma. The Bolsheviks, meeting for a conference in the Finnish town of Tammerfors in December 1905, decided (over Lenin's objections) to boycott these elections.

Later in 1923, he was one of forty-six Bolsheviks of the Left who signed a secret memorandum to the Politburo which spoke of "the ever-increasing, and now scarcely concealed, division of the party between a secretarial hierarchy and 'quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party which does not participate in the common life."[483]

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.

Stalin's program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. "We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves,

Stalin's program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. "We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves," he said in the speech of July 9, 1928. "Isn't it clear that a great state covering a sixth of the earth's surface can't get along without grain reserves for internal and external needs?

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.

Not only did the barbaric incident shake the king's "confidence in the innate decency of mankind," it inspired his son's lifetime loathing of the Bolsheviks, the murder of his godfather, Nicholas II, setting his heart against the Soviets and all their works.

Hitler's treatment of the Austrian President Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Czech President Emil Hácha and the British and French leaders had been characterized by hucksterism, bullying and constant piling on of pressure, to which they had responded with a combination of gullibility, appeasement and weary resignation. Yet with his lifelong enemies the Bolsheviks, Hitler was attentive and respectful, though of course no less duplicitous. Their time would come.

Yet in 1917 the gulf between feminists and women workers deepened because of the continuing support of the former for the war and tendency to dismiss the workers' preoccupation with bread as base materialism. While the Bolsheviks took up the demand 'give us bread!' first heard in February the feminist physician Mariia Pokrovskaia insisted that 'to repeat to the people that "the revolution will give you a better piece of bread" is to appeal to the worst part of the people'.

When the Bolsheviks, came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism.

The speed with which this transformation took place was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing. In the Soviet Union itself, the evolution of a totalitarian state had taken two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint.

The Bolsheviks started not just on the killing of private property; they were trying to abolish money itself.

Were there mistakes? Yes, there were. Only those who don't act don't make mistakes. But to organize well - that's a difficult task.' (Lenin to the All-Russian Conference of Bolsheviks on 24 April, 1917.)

Again in Russia, we find a tiny group of zealots—calling themselves "the majority" (Bolsheviks)—who planned to control everything from a central authority. Lenin wrote most of the "scientific" program for a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, which was then debated and modified by other communist leaders. Socialism had to be imposed from above, by educated elites. There would be no from-the-bottom-up modifications.

the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia's hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia's iron and 60 percent of its steel.

the Bolsheviks, less than 25 percent.

the Bolsheviks' intention to build a utopian society based on radical equality produced so many enemies so quickly. Part of this had to do with their need to turn the assumptions of Western liberal democracy upside down, thereby concentrating all power in the state. Only this could guarantee such equality. The result was that from a political standpoint, the individual counted for nothing. It was an equality based on an absence rather than a presence of rights.