Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

Trotsky appeared later and after assembling Foreign Office force, announced himself Minister for Foreign Affairs whereupon entire force declined to serve and left department which is now closed, not even responding to telephone calls. Only department responding to telephone is Ways of Communication but Minister of Ways of Communication imprisoned.

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.

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

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.

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

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

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

In the Soviet Union those who once extolled Stalin to the skies have now in one sweep condemned him to purgatory … Stalin’s mistakes amounted to only 30 percent of the whole and his achievement to 70 percent. On balance he was a great Marxist.

The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don't see their kind returning anytime soon.

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

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

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.

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.

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

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

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

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.

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.

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality.

Stalin's methods did not help.

Joseph Stalin was a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anyone for the sake of his own power and glory.

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were 'historically obsolete' and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.