Stalin Quotes

“Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and journalist,” and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father’s engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman. Now,”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Russia was a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge. Unmodern in principle, let alone in practice, the autocracy died a deserving death in the maelstrom of the Anglo-German antagonism, the bedlam of Serbian nationalism, the hemophilia bequeathed by Queen Victoria, the pathology of the Romanov court, the mismanagement by the Russian government of its wartime food supply, the determination of women and men marching for bread and justice, the mutiny of the capital garrison, and the defection of the Russian high command.

But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“If Mephistopheles climbed up the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?” huffed a newspaper of Germany’s outflanked liberals.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions. Martov’s majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed “firm authority.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process—moving from “traditional” to “modern” society—but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.47”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“(Some wags surmised the Western powers refrained from unseating the Soviet regime to give socialists around the world more time to see the full folly of their delusions.)”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Pitiless class warfare formed the core of Lenin’s thought—the”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“In other words, the Germans were continuing to place a large bet on Bolshevism, while at the same time containing it and extracting advantage.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Rancid horse penises, sold as meat at the company store, triggered the walkout.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“The Union of the Russian People helped invent a new style of right-wing politics—novel not just for Russia but for most of the world—a politics in a new key oriented toward the masses, public spaces, and direct action, a fascism avant la lettre.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary who would not meet Lenin for three more years, condemned his vision of organization as “military ultra-centralism.” Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes—suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“already done.” Molotov bitingly asked Zinoviev if he and Kamenev had been “brave in October 1917?” Zinoviev reminded them that not just Trotsky but Bukharin had opposed Brest-Litovsk in 1918, to”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“War, 46. 267. Bunyan, Intervention, 277,”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky:”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were “under the sway” of the kulaks.144”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“He added that “argumentation by use of force has the same significance as argumentation by use of economic means, and sometimes greater significance, when the market [grain procurements] has been spoiled and they try to turn our entire economic policy onto the rails of capitalism, which we will not do.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all.”47”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.’”366”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Entente hostility toward Soviet Russia, in other words, no more caused Bolshevik Western antagonism than Entente accommodation would have caused a friendly, hands-off Bolshevik disposition.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: “knows a foreign language,” “uses irony.”128”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water. In winter, the Cheka was said to pour water over naked prisoners, creating ice statues, while some prisoners were said to have their necks twisted to such a degree their heads came off.107 True or not, such tales contributed to the Cheka mystique.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin’s mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“More than 100,000 mostly urban Red Army troops were deployed, along with special Cheka detachments. After public executions, hostage taking, and conspicuous deportations of entire villages to concentration camps, by the third week of June 1920 only small numbers of rebel stragglers had survived.317 Tukhachevsky was flushing rebel remnants out of the forests with artillery, machine guns, and chlorine gas “to kill all who hide within.”318 At least 11,000 peasants were killed between May and July; the Reds lost 2,000. Many tens of thousands were deported or interred. “The bandits themselves have come to recognize . . . what Soviet power means,” the camp chief noted of his reeducation program.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928