Soviet History Quotes

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 "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

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

[Khrushchev] should get a one-ton medal.

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.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

I have argued that the Soviet story is one of the interaction of speculative excess or utopian aspirations with refractory reality.

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.

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.

I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.

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

He [Mikhail Gorbachev] has, as many great leaders have, impressive eyes....There's a kind of laser-beam stare, a forced quality, you get from Gorbachev that does not come across as something peaceful within himself. It's the look of a kind of human volcano, or he'd probably like to describe it as a human nuclear energy plant.

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

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.

Gorbachev's legacy is that he called time on communism, partially against his will, but in fact, he finished it off. Without violence. Without bloodshed. Beyond that, I am struggling to think of much else in terms of real legacy.

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.

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.

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

Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

Joseph Stalin is a titan of thought. His name is to be given to an entire century.

Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.

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.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

There is no greater advocate of perestroika than the president of the United States.