Quotes About Party

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]

was now mainly a question of formalizing the de facto control of the party organization that Stalin had attained. This was done when the Central Committee's organs were re-elected following the Eleventh Congress.

Consequently, it would be in no sense un-Marxist for the party to seize power and rule dictatorially in the interest of building a socialist society in Russia. This was the practical political conclusion implicit in every line of Lenin's seemingly scholastic theoretical treatise on Marxist views about the state.

Later in 1923, he was one of forty-six Bolsheviks of the Left who signed a secret memorandum to the Politburo which spoke of "the ever-increasing, and now scarcely concealed, division of the party between a secretarial hierarchy and 'quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party which does not participate in the common life."[483]

Cards had been prepared on twenty-six thousand of these full-time party functionaries, and the information on the seven thousand working at the province level had been set aside for detailed further study by Central Committee officials, with a view to defining a still smaller category of more important figures.[371]

Stalin found a party machine in being. Where he differed from his predecessors in the secretaryship was in turning the position to his own political advantage. He set about building up a personal machine as an informal political reality within the official one, a Stalin empire in the party-state.

The Orgburo was shifting leading personnel around in implementing policy decisions taken in the Politburo. Lower-level personnel decisions were within the jurisdiction of the Secretariat, and the latter, through Uchraspred, was able to effect appointments and transfers in the system of party organizations throughout the country. Here was a boundless field of opportunity for empire-building by a man of Stalin's ambitions and aptitudes.

that the Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution on unity, drafted by Lenin, which banned factions in the party. Reflecting the competition of "platforms" on the trade union issue, which had divided the party in the pre-congress period, it defined factionalism as "the emergence of groups with special platforms and a certain striving to close ranks and create their own group discipline."[485

At the time of Lenin's death there were in the party four different factional groupings with representation on the Politburo.

Stalin, as many in the party soon began to perceive, was acting in the manner of a political boss. But we should take care not to assume that he saw himself in this light.

In 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev belatedly joined in what was called the "united opposition." A rearguard action by two crippled factions, it was doomed to the debacle that overtook it in late 1927 when Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, along with large numbers of their followers, were expelled from the party.

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

Lenin's personal charisma was neither institutionalized in an office of supreme party leadership (as we have already noted, he had held none), nor was it easily transferable to a successor. No one among the leaders of the party succeeded to Lenin's extraordinary authority.

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.

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.

I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.

Nothing is so convincing as someone who's a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it.

A fool and his money is one big party.

America was founded out of tax protest. Have they forgotten the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773?

the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn't know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me.

So . . . with several key suspects on the line, she had a lot to think about. But first, there was a tea party that needed hosting.

Time to leave the party; Time to reach for me; Time to give me room to breathe.