Quotes About Stalin

For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed.

Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the "miracle" of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.

The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced toward his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it— or even to contemplate it.

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.

It was Stalin's Great Terror updated for modern times, with disinformation, legal machinations, indiscriminate violence. Bloodshed was a way of proving loyalty. One was either with or against. And the penalties for resistance were changing all the time, from imprisonment to death, ordered or merely allowed to happen. It amounted to the same thing.

Stalin's Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria's behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.

In some important aspects the Nazi genocide was not unique. In numbers killed, Hitler was surpassed by Stalin and by Mao. In proportion of the population killed, he was surpassed by Pol Pot. But, in other ways, there was a unique moral horror to what the Nazis did. There was an intensity of positive hatred in those who planned the genocide,

Stalin's teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another'… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.

Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.

Signing off on the daily execution lists, Stalin was heard to remark: "Who is going to remember this riffraff in ten, twenty years' time? No one.

Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin's empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

One time, Alexander Nikolaevich discovered, Stalin invited an old friend back in Georgia to Moscow for a reunion. They dined and drank—Stalin took pride in his hospitality and his menus, which he personally curated.7 Later the same night, the friend was arrested in his hotel room. He was executed before dawn. This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.8

Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin's mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession.

Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country's livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism

Closed and gregarious, vindictive and solicitous, Stalin shatters any attempt to contain him within binaries. He was by inclination a despot who, when he wanted to be, was utterly charming. He was an ideologue who was flexibly pragmatic.

This Asiatic pose was a side of Stalin almost no one saw.

Stalin's rudeness was in service to the cause. His rudeness was zeal

Whether Stalin, out in Siberia, met with actual peasants, let alone large throngs of them, as did Stolypin, remains unclear.

Stalin's moods were becoming almost as difficult to parse as the intentions of the Soviet Union's external enemies.

Stalin was desperately making up spurious arguments, and showed himself to be thin-skinned, an intellectual bully.

The plenum concluded with a tribute dashed off to Stalin in which the participants exclaimed, "we cannot express in words the full force of our love for you," and pledged their readiness to "meet the enemy."4 The officials who made this vow of absolute loyalty did not know it then, but as it turned out, they were the enemy.

Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin's grip. Out of the business directorate he and his functionaries carved out a separate entity named the "secret department," which took charge of denunciations and investigations, the party archives, and the contacts with the secret police.