Quotes About Stalin

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

In the NEP era Soviet society was not yet the tightly controlled organism that it would become during the Stalinist thirties as a result of the revolution from above that Stalin initiated in late 1929, when the power to do so was finally in his hands.

In 1925 Stalin had said that there was latent "beat the kulak" sentiment in the party.

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?

As in the earlier debate over "socialism in one country," Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called "Stalinism.

It was the Lenin of kto kogo? As Stalin put it in his speech to the Central Committee plenum of April 1929, when he branded Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the leaders of the "Right deviation" in the party, "The situation is that we live according to Lenin's formula of 'kto kogo': either we shall pin them, the capitalists, to the ground and give them, as Lenin expressed it, final decisive battle, or they will pin our shoulders to the ground.

discrepancy between power and authority thus existed in early post-Lenin Bolshevism. Powerful though he had become in the party, Stalin was not yet widely perceived and accepted as Lenin's successor in the role of supreme leader of the party.

Earlier in the year, Trotsky had been shipped into exile in Turkey. Organized opposition was now at an end. The struggle for leadership was over, and Stalin was the victor. As if to mark this fact and formalize the outcome, his fiftieth birthday, on December 21, 1929, was officially celebrated with great fanfare. The party, over which the Stalin faction reigned supreme, saluted him on that occasion as Lenin's successor—the new vozhd'.

Two years after his death, by which time Stalin was far along in his march to power, the succession problem was still unresolved. Stalin delivered the political report of the Central Committee before the Fourteenth Congress, appearing in a role that had traditionally been Lenin's and that Zinoviev had taken at the two preceding party congresses. But he was not an acknowledged new supreme leader of the party with authority in any way comparable to Lenin's.

Gratitude, he said, quoting Stalin, is a dog's disease.

You know, boy, people criticise Stalin, but you've got to say this for him: he lived like a worker. Not like Beria – he thought he was a prince. But Comrade Stalin's room was a plain man's room. You've got to say that for Stalin. He was always one of us.

Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.

there was a greater likelihood that individuals who committed crimes within the Nazi system would take personal responsibility for their actions, than there was that war criminals who served Stalin or Hirohito would take such responsibility.

Each of the two Western leaders came to believe that they could form a 'special' bond with Stalin. Both were wrong. Stalin had no 'special' bond with anyone. But in their attempt to charm him they had missed the fact that he had, in his own individual way, charmed them instead.

Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.

Hitler had done quite enough in his career to prove how utterly untrustworthy he was long before the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, yet as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out: 'Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler.

General Konstantin Rokossovsky, one of those who were tortured during that time – though not shot despite his Polish origins – later said that purges were even worse for morale than when artillery fired on one's own troops because it would have to have been very accurate artillery fire

Although the Soviet Union suffered over 90 per cent of the casualties of the Big Three Powers, Churchill did not want the Americans to behave as if Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship had some sort of moral equivalency with the Western democracies. Truman nonetheless went ahead and met Stalin privately.

As the Potsdam Conference opened, Truman was able to tell Stalin officially about the existence of the Bomb. Stalin showed the requisite amount of surprise, not revealing that his spies had kept him fully informed and that he was already trying to build his own.

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler).

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler). Yet Churchill could not discover Stalin's true views about him because after June 1941 Britain's intelligence services were ordered not to spy on Britain's new Soviet ally, a mistaken policy that was certainly not reciprocated.

I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.