Carlo Sforza Quotes
Bolshevism must live and die of itself, without pressure from abroad.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution many of the Western Countries sent troops to Russia where they aided the Whites against the Reds. When the Red Bolsheviks prevailed, there were many attempts to diplomatically and economically undermine the Communist government. This caused a unity among different Russian factions. Sforza urged leaving them alone and letting the Bolsheviks fail by their own ideology. Most Western nations and the United States did not agree with him.
Carlo Sforza, 1872–1952, Foreign Minister of Italy, Anti-Fascist Italian Leader, Speech to Parliament, June, 1920
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This is an example of what made the Cold War so difficult. The Italian Communists had great misgivings about the Russian version of Communism that tended to abuse human rights and try and control other countries. However, when the Russian Communists were under world attacks by the West, as with their incursion into Hungary, he urged that all the Communists stick together and defend the Russians even for policies that they thought wrong. On the West side, the same thing occurred. The United States tolerated and supported a number of terribly oppressive dictatorships that were virulently anti-Communist. Polarization was the international norm.
Commenting on political parties in Cuba:
Vladimir Lenin. While Lenin was of this view, Stalin and other hard liners disagreed. They not only imposed their brand of communism on their own people via force with terrible consequences for any dissidents, but the Soviet Army imposed Communism on most of the states of Eastern Europe, and those states in turn used their Armies and secret police to impose it on their own citizens.
In 1921 an Paul E. De Mott, an American Quaker famine relief worker in Germany was arrested as a "Bolshevik" and murdered without trial. American correspondents heard about the crime and asked for a statement from the chief American diplomat in Germany.
This was the basic document issued after the Russian Revolution establishing the basic legal and economic structure of the new Soviet State.
At the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935 the new Popular Front policy was announced. To communist hard-liners and to the far left, the policy was an abandonment of the Marxist revolutionary line.
Others proclaimed the republic as well and a power struggle ensued.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. This turned out to be one of the worst predictions in political history.
