Quotes About Stalin

The twentieth century became an age of totalitarianism, culminating in the attempt of Hitler and Stalin to establish a new kind of political order based on total police control, terror, and the ruthless suppression and murder of real or imagined opponents in their millions on the one hand, and continual mass mobilization and enthusiasm whipped up by sophisticated propaganda methods on the other.30

I didn't sign up for any of this, but at worst I always thought being the Devil would be at least a little fun. Shooting BBs at Hitler as he tightrope walks over a lake of boiling lemon juice and broken glass. Playing Pin the Tail on the Stalin. After lunch, maybe a few rounds of Ted Bundy Whac-A-Mole.

The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants. Note that Hostile Strength (the tyrant) is inclined to paranoid withdrawal; he must govern, but he is also afraid. Cf. the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Howard Hughes, etc. and the inaccessible Castle and Court in Kafka's allegories. Note also that the dependent neurotic is not in retreat at all; he or she advances upon you, demanding fulfillment of emotional "needs" (imprints).

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don't want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin's biggest messes.

For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world. Hence in the days of Confucius, of Muhammad or of Stalin, people should have listened to their feelings rather than to the teachings of Confucianism, Islam or communism. Yet

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

Any marked improvement in economic conditions would almost certainly activate the tradition of freedom which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia, as pointed out in Section 45, the individual who pitted himself against Stalin had nothing to identify himself with, and his capacity to resist coercion was nil. But in a traditionally free country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race—his rebellious ancestors. 122

When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing.

Irving Kristol, for his part, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, like a right-wing Joseph Stalin, that the political advantage tax cuts would provide Republicans was so historically imperative that they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. "The neoconservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards": now was no time to go wobbly.

Lenin was taking account of this ingrained assumption when he wrote in the postscript to the testament that the question of Stalin's personal qualities "may seem an insignificant trifle." And he was taking issue with it when he went on to contend that in this instance the personality trifle might prove of decisive historical significance.

Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin's personality very much mattered.

This was Lenin's doing. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, "Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

The proposal for a Russia-based party organ carried an overtone of self-nomination to the editorial role that Stalin in fact came to play when Pravda was founded in Petersburg three years later. In a resolution of January 22, 1910, written by Stalin, the Baku party committee not only repeated the proposal for an all-Russian party organ but called for "the transfer of the (directing) practical center to Russia.

when the Bolshevik faction was recast as a separate party at the Prague conference in 1912, the Central Committee, now all-Bolshevik in composition, not only co-opted Stalin but also elected him as one of the four members of a "Russian Bureau" for direction of party activities inside Russia.

What the "one country" idea meant to Stalin, as became quite clear from his many speeches of the middle twenties, was that Russia, which had shown the world the way to proletarian revolution, would now be able, with or without help from outside, at the cost of great exertions, to accomplish the second historic feat of constructing a full socialist society.

The ugly wrangle over the testament must have dimmed the satisfaction that Stalin derived from his political triumph at this time over the united opposition.

Stalin's whole mode of being in the world militated against the renunciation of the idea of a new revolutionary period. The perspective of an ever-diminishing internal class struggle as the right way to socialism was totally alien to his makeup. Fighting, struggle and conquest were what he lived for as a Marxist and a Leninist. Socialism had always meant to him a gospel of class war and it still did, whatever Lenin might have said toward the end about civil peace and reformism.

Marxism and the National Question was basically Stalin's, and the collaboration with Lenin that underlay it seems to have been mutually beneficial.

Breakneck industrialization, with priority for heavy industry, and forcible mass collectivization of the peasantry would be the twin hallmarks of the revolution from above that Stalin inaugurated in 1929.

Thus was Stalin's call for collective farming incorporated into official policy, causing the Fifteenth Congress to be described in later party histories as the "congress of collectivization.

Stalin chose Siberia as his destination on what must have seemed—as his train pulled out of Moscow on January 15, 1928—a rerun of his grain-expediting mission of a decade ago to Tsaritsyn.

The portion of the "Letter to the Congress" kept secret at the time of writing remained unopened during the first few months after Lenin died. It was probably fortunate for Stalin's emotional equilibrium in those tense months that he continued in ignorance of the fact that Lenin had intended to unseat him from the post of general secretary. The blow was hard enough to sustain when it came.