C. Wright Mills Quotes
Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!
Mills, C. Wright. C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Kathryn Mills and Pamela Mills, University of California Press, 2000, p. 306.
Lenin, Uritsky, and other Bolshevik leaders were attacked in 1918. Lenin was wounded but Utrtsky died, and this triggered the attacks on the other Russian factions by the Bolsheviks known as the “Red Terror.”
Even leading Soviet officials were critical of the Stalin era and Stalin’s brutal, dictatorial methods.
This quotation is a great demonstration of how much wiser and the better politician of all the crowned heads of Europe that Queen Victoria was. There were stirrings of freedom and desire for parliamentary government throughout Europe. Queen Victoria, even though and perhaps because she was a young woman, had a great feel for fairness and reasonableness and had read a great deal of history. There were some radical red socialists calling for complete radical revolution scaring European Royalty profoundly. They reacted very conservatively and with reaction, reverting to more tyrannical practices of the past urged in that path by very conservative, right wing advisors. Victoria also had little respect for some of the monarchs who had little interest in their people and much with their personal power and wealth. In the end, it was England which was the only nation which never had a serious radical socialist / communist threat, and that had much to do with Victoria’s political acumen and wisdom.
Some on the extreme left of the Labor Party at the time were extolling Soviet Russia while denigrating the United States. Crossman, an avid socialist thought that was absurd and said so at every opportunity. The pro Soviet wing of the Labour party got smaller and smaller. He and many others thought that Russian Communism was a very poor implementation of socialist ideas.
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals. He is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites; White Collar: The American Middle Classes, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, which presents a model of analysis for the interdependence of subjective experiences within a person's biography, the general social structure, and historical development.
