Conspirator Quotes

“Anyone who did not master conspiratorial techniques was considered a kustar’ – an amateur; amateurism was anathema to Ulyanov and he was obsessive in eradicating”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“The success of the whole operation in Russia now rested upon what, to Ulyanov, was the most crucial element: konspiratsiya. The word in Russian did not mean ‘conspiracy’ or plotting as we know it, but, rather, the utmost secrecy or stealth in the avoidance of detection. The principles of konspiratsiya had been tested during the years of Narodnaya Volya’s guerrilla activities and their violent campaign of political assassination up to 1881 and had since become Ulyanov’s guiding principle:”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“love of power and his dealing so contemptuously with people once he had fallen out with them.38 In Ulyanov’s view, Struve had betrayed orthodox Marxism with the ‘bourgeois apologetics’ of his conciliatory, legal Marxism. He was nothing but ‘a politico, an artful dodger, a huckster, and an impudent boor”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“Struve came away convinced of his and Ulyanov’s irreconcilability – morally, politically and socially. Both Ulyanov and Plekhanov had been brusque, to the point of mockery, in their rejection of him, but he found something unnerving and ‘repulsively cold’ in Ulyanov’s behaviour. Such coldness was ‘organic’,”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“These arguments were, in his eyes, ‘reactionary’; they subverted his insistence on relentless class war leading to the violent overthrow of the tsarist order.”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“political change in Russia could come through parliamentary politics and unionisation of the workers in a campaign for social reform, economic freedom, better pay and conditions. Such thinking – suggesting conciliation with capitalism and the monarchy – enraged Ulyanov,”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

“But Ulyanov had learned an important lesson from his misguided hero worship of Plekhanov. From here on he would exorcise all personal feeling in his political dealings and trust nobody. One had, as he put it, to ‘keep a stone in one’s sling’.”
― Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile