Quotes About Stalin

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.

The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend Lease, we would lose this war." True enough, but without Churchill, much of Europe might have been lost to Hitler before Roosevelt and Stalin were in the fight at all.

Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.

if there was any power in the 1930s and 1940s that exemplified the Fascist slogan of the 'triumph of will' over material circumstances it was not Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, but Stalin's Marxist dictatorship.

The spectacular escalation of violence unleashed in the 1930s and the 1940s was a testament to the kind of force that the insurgents believed themselves to be up against. It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action.

O]nly a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved.

It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding

It was the Soviet Union under Stalin that defeated Adolf Hitler, not the United States, which only intervened once Hitler was in retreat.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders," Churchill observed in his memoirs, "but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equaled that of which Stalin and the Communist Chiefs were guilty when they . . . supinely awaited or were incapable of realizing, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.

My lot were shocked and disturbed, for we thought, if you are not 'politically conscious', then you get what you deserve – Hitler, at least. That some of the most politically conscious generations in history had got Stalin was not a thought we could yet accommodate.

We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word 'leader' was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, 'wild applause for fifteen minutes'. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.

The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.

Stalin's policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.

As colonial puppeteer and successful restorer of Russia as imperial superpower, Mr. Putin is Stalin's consummate heir.

There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.

We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender.

The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and 'an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it'.

Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?

Lenin g?sea muzica deprimant?. Stalin credea c? înÈ›elege È™i apreciaz? muzica. HruÈ™ciov dispreÈ›uia muzica. Ce e mai r?u pentru un compozitor?

I'm getting a little tired of politicians trying to prove how 'moderate' and 'centrist' they are by taking more of my money and freedom. Where's this center - somewhere between Lenin and Stalin?

Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.

One of the successes of the cause of the friends of peace is the ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance.

Stalin never forgot or forgave. He once told a Russian writer that Ivan the Terrible had not been ruthless enough because he left too many enemies alive.