Brian Cox Quotes

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

Now that the great revolution has come one feels that however intelligent Lenin may be he begins to fade beside the genius of Trotsky

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of the Russian bourgeoisie

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

Revolutions in Russia are even worse than bad czars.

I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.

Stalin is a shameful stain on our country's history.

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!

Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.

Stalin's policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.

There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.

We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.

It's a bit of a history lesson, being an actor. I was in 'Burnt By The Sun' at the National, which was set in Stalinist Russia, so I discovered all about that. You learn so much as you go along.

Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.