Quotes About Stalin

Even Stalin's absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity.

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five . . . and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278

Und wenn Stalin seine Ge­neräle erschießt, dann brauchen wir das nicht einmal zu tuen. Ob wohl Stalin allmählich auch die Juden liquidiert? Vielleicht nennt er sie nur, um die Welt zu täuschen, Trotzkisten. Wer weiß? Jedenfalls sind wir nun mit Rußland verbunden. Wir haben bisher nur Vorteile davon gehabt. Der Führer hat Stalin in einem Film gesehen, und da war er ihm gleich sympathisch. Da hat eigentlich die deutsch-russische Koalition begonnen".

I have sworn before a portrait of the late lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

Hell, I doubt if they even knew [that] Russia, just less than a hundred years ago, owned Finland, sucked the blood out of Poland, and were using Siberia as a prison for their own people. How Stalin must have sneered when he got through with them at all those phony conferences."1

Roosevelt has no problem with this; he likes Joseph Stalin and believes he can trust him.

Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million "unnatural deaths" during Stalin's time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that "death solves all problems" and "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic" murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Moreover, as the Smolensk Archive spells out in detail, Stalin's methods of rule succeeded in destroying whatever measure of competence and technical know-how the country had acquired after the October Revolution.

The fact that the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behavior—that, on the contrary, one could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before—naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one was doing, that Himmler's ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed: My honor is my loyalty.

Technically speaking, Khrushchev's coup followed the methods of his dead and denounced master very closely. He too needed an outside force in order to win power in the party hierarchy, and he used the support of Marshal Zhukov and the army exactly the same way Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession struggle of thirty years ago.

for just as Stalin had never hesitated to purge his police cadres and liquidate their chief, so Khrushchev had followed up his inner-party maneuvers by removing Zhukov from the Presidium and Central Committee of the party, to which he had been elected after the coup, as well as from his post as highest commander of the army.

The open, unashamed adoption of what had become to the whole world the most prominent sign of Nazism was the last compliment Stalin paid to his late colleague and rival in total domination with whom, much to his chagrin, he had not been able to come to a lasting agreement.

By the time Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history. It was at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.

One of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd's luxurious Astoria Hotel who went on, after the Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.

The formation of Stalin's character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.

Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.

In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.180 He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that 'the Party has made me in its own image'. He and the Party had

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: "Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I'm in some sort of destroyed city and I can't find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM..."1

When Polina Molotova, mistress of the perfume industry, boasted to Stalin that she was wearing her latest product, Red Moscow, Stalin sniffed: 'That's why you smell so nice,' he said.

Stalin personally controlled a 'Soviet Hollywood' through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs.