Quotes About Stalin

To justify murdering tens of millions, Stalin is reputed to have said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

He was murdered in Stalin's purges in 1940, at the age of 45.

In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

It is difficult to understand because you and I are not psychopaths. Things like this only make sense to them. Stalin, said it best, because he knew it best: "Kill one person and it's a national tragedy, kill a million people it is a statistic." And so he did because he could and that is the nature of the psychopath. They get away with as much as they can.

Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.

Stalin had always found Gorky unreliable; he had crossed swords with him in 1917, calling his protests "geese cackling in intellectual marshes

Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.

Not all chekisty were men. In the Crimea Stalin's Baku comrade Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Béla Kun, with Lenin's approval, murdered 50,000 White officers who had trusted Commander Frunze's safe conduct. Zemliachka, a Cheka sadist who would live to enjoy a pension, tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces, or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore.

Russia through the waning days of the Soviet Union and into the heyday after the fall, the Red Mafia was imbedded in almost all facets of state affairs. The bratva was not an outside criminal threat, but rather part of the government itself. When Stalin betrayed his criminal ties during the Great Purge, he inadvertently created an even stronger organization that had survived and thrived to this day.

By all accounts, Stalin, who was both prepared and well organized, was easily the best negotiator of the three leaders. American and British officials marveled at his mastery of the details of military operations and diplomatic issues. Indeed, many years later, Anthony Eden wrote: "If I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice.

most controversial of these movies—one whose production had been virtually commissioned by OWI and encouraged by Roosevelt himself—was Warner Bros.' Mission to Moscow, which seemed more interested in saluting Stalin and his regime than in praising the grit of the Russian people.

Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism.

The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?" These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.

As historian Max Hastings wrote, "Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin's purges.

And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country was another.

There was one important exception, however: after Hitler secretly sent death squads to assassinate all his rivals in the Nazi Party — a bloodbath known as the Night of Long Knives — Stalin couldn't help but admire his enemy's ingenuity. "Did you hear what happened in Germany?" he gushed to an adviser. "Some fellow, that Hitler! Splendid! That's a deed of some skill!

As historians have pointed out, there was some irony to this agreement. Hitler wanted to attack and subdue Russia as well as Europe. He knew that Germany could not wage war on a global scale with its small reserves of raw materials such as oil, rubber, and grain. Hitler arranged for the Russians to furnish him with everything he would need to invade Russia. Stalin essentially agreed to supply the attack on his own country.

A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.

It was still dangerous to disagree with Stalin. This fact was disastrous for the war effort. His generals were terrified of telling him bad news; it was safer to lie. For the first several months of the Great Patriotic War, therefore, he often didn't know the real strategic situation. Even worse, military experts couldn't question his amateur civilian judgment without fear of death.

Most important, it seems Stalin wanted to use the example of Shostakovich to scold and worry all of the Soviet Union's cultural leaders, rebuking them for turning away from "real art, real science, and real literature." He wanted to assert the infinite power of his regime and to show them that no one was safe.

Shostakovich hated the way propaganda amplified his life and sought to make it heroic. It galled him. He was naturally shy. Fame was deadly in Stalin's Russia. It marked you out for destruction.