Mao Zedong Quotes

No one has murdered more communists than the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin

Psychology and economics are Stalin's favorable winds. He is also the party 'boss.' But he is, in addition, the Soviet Union's most striking personality.

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.

Can and must! The proclamation of this new conception of [Joseph Stalin] is closed by the same words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution." In the course of a single year Stalin ascribed to [Vladimir] Lenin two directly opposed conceptions of the fundamental question of socialism. The first version represents the real tradition of the party; the second took shape in Stalin's mind only after the death of Lenin, in the course of the struggle against "Trotskyism".

I ALWAYS LIKED MR STALIN.

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

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

Not counting the 26.5 million Russians who died in WWII, 20 million Russians were killed by the Stalinist regimes….the Stalinist regeme is still an open wound that the country can’t close.

Stalin's methods did not help.

Russia has never recognized the crime of the Soviet regime. The crimes of the Stalin regime and the millions who died—There was no repentance.

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.

Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

[Vladimir] Lenin died in January, 1924; three months later [Joseph] Stalin expounded in writing Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.

Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

In the early days of the Russian Revolution in 1917, I was completely in sympathy with it. I felt that it established a new era in the history of the modern world. I was so overwhelmed by it that, if people made any unfriendly comment, I would vigorously defend it. If people condemned the Communist party, I would speak in its defense.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

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.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed.

In 1917, with the Bolsheviks, you had intra-elite conversations about what the country should be doing. You had arguments. Under Stalin, you didn’t really. But then after Stalin, you started having those arguments again.

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late '80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph's mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.