The Rise and Fall of Communism Quotes

“It’s a sociological law that the more information you give people, the more government policy becomes dependent on public opinion.’ Those were the words of Rafael Safarov,”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“Though Stalin was no more to be trusted than was Hitler, and though he was responsible for the deaths of more citizens of his own country than Hitler in Germany, he was a much more cautious actor on the international stage.”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“One major reason why radical economic reform was almost impossibly difficult to introduce in the Soviet Union was the strength of vested interests – in the first place, the bureaucracies of the economic ministries and the regional party organizations.”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“It is understandable that honest men should be dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and a thief.”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“That the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, although devoted to what he called the ‘socialist idea’, had long been sceptical about the ultimate goal of communism was evident from the fact that he recalled with relish a joke from Khrushchev’s time, albeit committing it to print only after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist:     A certain lecturer, speaking about future communist society, concluded with the following remarks, ‘The breaking day of communism is already visible, gleaming just over the horizon.’ At this point an old peasant who had been sitting in the front row stood up and asked, ‘Comrade Lecturer, what is a horizon?’ The lecturer explained that it is a line where the earth and the sky seem to meet, having the unique characteristic that the more you move toward it, the more it moves away. The old peasant responded: ‘Thank you, Comrade Lecturer. Now everything is quite clear.’18 The”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“Astafiev”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism

“There has been much controversy about the numbers of those imprisoned and killed at various times in the Stalin years, but the opening of the archives has led to some convergence towards a middle (but still horrific) figure, some millions fewer than the earlier highest estimates and some millions more than the estimates of those who downplayed the scale of Stalin’s terror. Ronald Suny, the editor of a recent major volume on twentieth-century Russian history, suggests that the ‘total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s is closer to 10–11 million than the 20–30 million estimated earlier’.68 Anne Applebaum, the author of a detailed study of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, arrives at a figure of 28.7 million forced labourers over the whole Soviet period. She includes in that number the ‘special exiles’, such as ‘kulaks’ and particular nationalities, among them the Tatars and Volga Germans, who were deported during World War Two. Applebaum notes that a figure of around 786,000 political executions between 1934 and 1953 is now quite widely accepted, although her own view is that the true figure is probably significantly higher than that number.69 The Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, dedicated to investigating the cases of repression in the Soviet period, more recently came up with the figure of 1.7 million people arrested in 1937–38 alone, of whom, they say, at least 818,000 were shot.70”
― Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism