Quotes About Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.

But in no way should any of this be taken to mean the Bolsheviks established effective structures of governance. Far from it: the Bolshevik monopoly went hand in hand with administrative as well as societal chaos, which Lenin's extremism exacerbated, causing an ever-deepening crisis, which he cited as justification for his extremism.

The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks.

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for non-existent traitors.

When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies... we had begun by making a mistake. Leniency towards such a power was a crime against the working classes. That soon became apparent...

U regijama koje su držali boljševici bila je to klasna borba protiv onih ispred, buržoazije, društveno stranih elemenata, lov na militante svih neboljševi?kih partija, represija nad radni?kim štrajkovima, pobune nesigurnih jedinica Crvene armije, selja?ki ustanci. U zonama koje su držali Bijeli, lov na osumnji?ene elemente mogu?ih simpatizera židovskih boljševika.

Prema Landeru, pitanje Crvenog terora bilo je riješeno za jedan dan. ?ekisti Piatigorska odlu?iše pogubiti 300 osoba za jedan dan. Oni su definisali kvote za grad i za svaku okolnu varoš, i naredili orgaizacijama Partije da sro?e liste za egzekucije. U Kislovodsku, u nedostatku drugih ideja, boljševici su odlu?ili ubiti ljude koji su bili u bolnici.

Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions. Martov's majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).

If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow.

the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. "It wouldn't hurt," he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik's remarks at the congress, "for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.

Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky:

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.

The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. 'How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.

The Bolsheviks promised their supporters 'Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets'. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation.

F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

Honest to God, so International Women's Day, just like May Day and just like Earth Day, all have roots to Marxism and the Bolsheviks and the Soviets.

Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them.

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

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.

Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that.

In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'.

But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.