Stalin Quotes

“Mao was several inches taller than Stalin, and this was a bitter pill to swallow, since Stalin often referred to Asians as “tiny.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“In 1947 he had allowed himself to be persuaded to abolish capital punishment in Russia. This did not mean he stopped killing people:”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Stalin’s Russia, like tsarist Russia, was a servile society. Before the Revolution of 1917, only one person in Russia was free: the tsar himself. Everyone else, from princes and archdukes downward, was limited to restrictions on his activities, movements, financial transactions, purchases of land, and personal relationships.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“As often, Stalin used Molotov, who was brought in to make edgy jokes. Stalin said that on Molotov’s last trip to New York he had taken a day off to go to Chicago, “as he wanted to see the other gangsters.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“He also decided to take more notice of the “de-crypts,” based upon the Enigma code-breaking system, that Churchill, taking a great but calculated risk, began to feed him from 1942. Stalin at first dismissed them as “one of Churchill’s tricks,” but he used them at Stalingrad and found them reliable and of great value.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Blokhin, who normally lived in the inner prison at the Lubyanka, where he was officially in charge with the rank of major-general, arrived in Poland at the Ostashkov Camp near the Katyn Forest. A specially built soundproof hut was built for him and his two assistants, the brothers Vasily and Ivan Zhigarev. To protect his uniform from the blood, he wore a leather butcher’s apron and a cap, and then proceeded to shoot Poles in the back of the head at the steady rate of 250 a night, for a month of nights—probably committing more individual killings than any other man in history.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“He shared the same love of anti-Semitic jokes as Hitler’s entourage. Indeed, his favorite performer at his evening dinner parties was a Hungarian hairdresser named Karl Pauker, who specialized in anti-Semitic jokes and did a funny turn of Zinoviev pleading for mercy, shouting in a whining Jewish accent, “For God’s sake, call Stalin!” He also did him singing the Hebrew chant, “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God!” Stalin roared until he choked.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“When Lenin got the news, he discarded his disguise, took off his wig and makeup, and opened an office in the Smolny Institute, formerly a girls’ school, as head of the government. At first there were fifteen members, who sat around the same table. One of the first proposals, made by Kamenev and Trotsky, was to abolish capital punishment in the army. According to Stalin’s later account, Lenin vetoed it, saying, “Absolute nonsense. It is impossible to push through a revolution without killing people. Preferably by shooting, it is quickest.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“He owned twenty thousand books, though nobody ever actually saw him reading. He went often to the opera, ballet, theater, and cinema. He played the gramophone a lot. He liked Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, pieces by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, and almost anything by Glinka. He disapproved of Mozart, saw Figaro only once and found it “dull,” though oddly enough he loved to play his Piano Concerto no. 23 on the gramophone.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“What could not be expected from any of his children was affection. Stalin showed none for his two legitimate sons, and his love for his daughter, though genuine, was intermittent. There is abundant testimony that Stalin had charm when he chose to exercise it. He made constant jokes. He did imitations. He was particularly keen on doing “Red Indian” war dances, which he got from The Last of the Mohicans, a favorite book. His war whoop was bloodcurdling.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“He enjoyed tormenting colleagues who had Jewish wives, beginning with Molotov, who had a wife described as a “real battle axe,” Polina. Stalin enjoyed locking her up and forcing Molotov to sign her committal certificate, especially since he blamed “stone-arse,” as he called Molotov, for his brief infatuation with Zionism.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Mao thought Stalin’s poetry, some of which he had taken the trouble to obtain and read, was “rubbish.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“German tanks got to within twenty miles of central Moscow in the north and thirty miles in the west, but that is as far as they managed.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Almost all the oil Hitler used in his spring 1940 offensive against France came from Russia, and the five-million-strong French Communist Party, though now outlawed, was directed to sabotage French military defense, which it did with considerable success.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“At the end of 1936 the population in the gulags rose to well over a million, and Stalin decided on a “thinning-down operation,” as it was called. Heads of all camps were ordered to submit lists of prisoners who “continued to conduct anti-state agitation in custody.” Each head was given a quota of total arrests and ordered to shoot 28 percent of them. The number was given precisely: 72,900. They were driven in lorries marked “meat” or “vegetables” to places where pits had been dug, and then shot in the back of the head.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Stalin supervised his own bodyguard system in minute detail, and although no one knew exactly how it worked, a preemptive strike at Stalin was almost certainly futile. None was ever made.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Siberia gave him a terrible fear of wolves, especially in packs. He also feared spiders, and disliked and distrusted both cats and hedgehogs. He owned at least four dogs, one of whom, Tishka, a small mongrel, he adored. He liked mice and sometimes fed them.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Collectively, this Napoleonic progeny of evil made the twentieth century the outstanding epoch of ideological oppression, mass murder, warfare on a colossal scale, and innovative technology that enabled humans to lie, deceive, and pervert the human mind to infernal purposes.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“Stalin was a monster, one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“While under the tsars the average number of executions was only seventeen, by 1918 the Cheka was killing an average of a thousand people a month for political crimes alone.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

“As Khrushchev put it, “He prodded the capitalist world with the tip of his bayonet.” He himself put it, “If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.”
― Paul Johnson, Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer