Geoffery Robertson Quotes
Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.
Geoffery Robertson, English Jurist, United Nations War Crimes Appeals Court Justice, Lecture, Gaithersburg, Maryland, September 25, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Even leading Soviet officials were critical of the Stalin era and Stalin’s brutal, dictatorial methods.
Vladimir Lenin. One of the claimed benefits of Capital Punishment has always been the inhibition of others, but it turned out that it was never very effective at that. However, prevention was Lenin’s major objective so he ordered public hanging instead of shooting—the usual method of execution at the time. This infamous quotation started the new Russian government off on a horrible record of civil and human rights. The people hanged were not particularly guilty of any crime. They were just people who had gotten, or whose family was, rich under the Czar. The disregard for rule of law was most dramatically evidenced by this Lenin order. Needless to say, rich people the world over, saw a great threat to their lives from this new state wanting to export its philosophy.
The FBI was accused of tapping congressional phones and infiltrating college campuses:
then KGB leader. Khrushchev had rounded up and arrested an assortment of dissidents and non enthusiastic communists It was to culminate in 8 million arrests and 1 million executions.
Stalin’s purges and suppression of potential rivals killed off mostly other communists exceeding the number of communists killed by brutal, murderous, anti-communist forces over the world.
Seeger had joined the Young Communist League as a young boy, and was a supporter of Joseph Stalin until all the information about Stalin was made public by Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Seeger, along with other Stalin apologists throughout the world realized that the criticisms of Russian Communism under Stalin were not just right wing propaganda.
This was a very important quotation in that Sartre was a very influential liberal philosopher and when he condemned Russian communism, many other liberals opposed communism, and those who had already felt vindicated in their decision.
As Ukraine found out in 2014, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, had a similar outlook as the Kremlin of the Soviet Union 70 years earlier.
This was a big factor that made the Red Scare so damaging.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded to include some fo the former Soviet Nations thus moving NATO territiry to the East--closer to Russia, whose leaders percieved that the expansion was hostile and dangerous for the indpendence of Russia. What made the situation more complex is that the American Secretary of State, when the Soviet Union was very powerful, had made an agreement with the Soviets that in return for Russian aquiessance of NATO being extended to East Germany, NATO would not expand further West. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was quite weak and NATO expanded east despite the earleir comittment. The US and th eother NATO counties took the pozition the previous comitmnts were not binidng as they were never formally signed. The Russians then decided to take a hard line position and flaunt and use military force to which would stop the Western expansion closer to the Russian border.
