Quotes About Soviet

Since the party was the ruling political authority in the Soviet state, it was not as chief of government but as head of the party that Lenin acted as supreme leader.

classical Marxism proclaimed the imminence of world proletarian revolution, Leninism (or "Marxism-Leninism," as it became known in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death) originated in the proposition that there is no proletarian revolution except through the party.

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.

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

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.

At the end of 1927 and in the early months of 1928 the Soviet regime was confronted with a critical shortage of grain procurements. Among the reasons for peasant withholding of grain from the market was an intensified goods famine brought on in part by fiscal policies espoused earlier under the influence of Bukharinist low-price philosophy.[614] In an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.

The only acceptable type of autonomy was one exercised through the Soviet organization of a region in which one or more distinct national groups predominated.

The first large-scale party purge of the Soviet period took place during the ensuing months, under the direction of the secretarial trio, and Molotov reported to the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922 that the party's membership had been reduced from 660,000 to about 500,000 through the expulsions and forced resignations that resulted. "Now," he said, "those numerous currents and semi-formed factions do not exist."[369]

Stalin was elected a member of the Secretariat and accorded the title "general secretary" in token of his seniority in a new secretarial trio whose two other members were Molotov and Kuibyshev. The base of operations was now securely in his possession.

the Central Committee expanded from a size of twenty-seven members and nineteen candidates in 1922 to sixty-three members and forty-three candidates in 1925, and many of the newcomers were Stalin supporters.

Basic Soviet strategy in foreign affairs, under which the Comintern and the Foreign Commissariat operated as two arms of a dual policy, one working to overthrow capitalist governments while the other tried to conduct business with them, was essentially Lenin's creation, as was the notion of a Soviet diplomacy designed to reduce the insecurity of the revolutionary state by aggravating the discords between its enemies.

But institutionally authoritarian as it was, the Soviet party-state of the NEP years was a far cry from the dread bureaucratic leviathan conjured up by our image of a "totalitarian system."[490]

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.

What harsh sour souls they must have had, these frightening and frightened folk, creating for themselves in the lush fertile plains of India such a Supreme Soviet of a city!

Even more basic to McCarthy's success, the president never challenged the senator's meat-and-potatoes premises: that merely believing in communism was dangerous, and that Soviet subversion threatened the stability and safety of America.

It was deeply ironic that when McCarthy's self-serving campaign against the Red Menace was at its height, Soviet penetration of the American government was at its lowest ebb for almost thirty years.

The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.

In the gray Poland plundered by the Soviet utopia there was no shortage of cunning petty demons on the party payroll out searching for young souls with ballistic tendencies, souls who dreamed of greatness and despised the trifling daily round of worries and pursuits.

being sacked. Major's hopes for central regulation withering away echo Lenin, who hoped for a 'withering away' of the Soviet

I knew we were going to pass one of the Soviet Union's most secret atomic sites, the subterranean labyrinth code-named Krasnoyarsk-26, once one of the world's most prodigious producers of plutonium. Built to make the fissile material for nuclear warheads, the entire complex had been constructed inside the mountain. It never appeared on Soviet maps.

Romanian ice cream … Shortages are routine all over the Soviet Union. The store in Moscow where his own family shops is full of

Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR 1982

It fell to President Harry Truman to contain Soviet expansionism. He built America's first peacetime alliances, starting in Western Europe, then in Asia.