Stalin as Revolutionary Quotes

“Lenin, as we have seen, became alarmed about Stalin’s rudeness; his administrative peremptoriness; his Great Russian nationalism; his tendency to give animosity free rein in official conduct; and his lack of tolerance, loyalty, and considerateness toward others. It was a weighty catalogue of politically significant character defects, but not a reasoned analysis. The others, too, even as their horror of Stalin deepened, stood somehow mentally paralyzed before the enigma of the man’s personality.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“This was to emasculate Lenin’s accusation in the act of pleading guilty to it.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Not he but Trotsky had risen to the heights of glory as Lenin’s right-hand man in the Revolution and the Civil War.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, “Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin’s personality very much mattered.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Lenin was taking account of this ingrained assumption when he wrote in the postscript to the testament that the question of Stalin’s personal qualities “may seem an insignificant trifle.” And he was taking issue with it when he went on to contend that in this instance the personality trifle might prove of decisive historical significance.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Apart from their attitude toward Lenin, Bolsheviks were not generally inclined to attach much importance to the personal factor in politics. To their Marxist-trained minds, what mainly mattered about a comrade was not his personality but his political beliefs, his ideological commitment, the rightness or wrongness of his positions in party councils.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Earlier in the year, Trotsky had been shipped into exile in Turkey. Organized opposition was now at an end. The struggle for leadership was over, and Stalin was the victor. As if to mark this fact and formalize the outcome, his fiftieth birthday, on December 21, 1929, was officially celebrated with great fanfare. The party, over which the Stalin faction reigned supreme, saluted him on that occasion as Lenin’s successor—the new vozhd’.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“This metaphorical depiction of the Soviet situation as a great wrestling match of opposing classes was at once a manifesto of Stalin’s Leninism and a clear revelation of his lifelong need to “beat” in the twofold sense of “strike” and “be victorious.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“It was the Lenin of kto kogo? As Stalin put it in his speech to the Central Committee plenum of April 1929, when he branded Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the leaders of the “Right deviation” in the party, “The situation is that we live according to Lenin’s formula of ‘kto kogo’: either we shall pin them, the capitalists, to the ground and give them, as Lenin expressed it, final decisive battle, or they will pin our shoulders to the ground.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“As in the earlier debate over “socialism in one country,” Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called “Stalinism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Stalin’s program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. “We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves,” he said in the speech of July 9, 1928. “Isn’t it clear that a great state covering a sixth of the earth’s surface can’t get along without grain reserves for internal and external needs?”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Stalin’s program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. “We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves,”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“In 1925 Stalin had said that there was latent “beat the kulak” sentiment in the party.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country’s advance toward socialism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Hence class struggle, of which the recent emergency measures were an expression, must be seen as a normal phenomenon under the NEP.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The capitalist elements, kulaks included, would naturally resist the offensive in all ways open to them.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“As for the nexus (smychka) between working class and peasantry—the need to preserve which was a fundamental article of faith in the party—there existed, said Stalin, not only a “nexus through textiles” but also a “nexus through metal” or mechanization, and the latter had the advantage that it would ensure the “remaking of the peasant in the spirit of collectivism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The prime source of accumulation was the “scissors” between town and countryside: charging the peasant high prices for manufactured goods while paying him low ones for farm products. Avoiding Preobrazhensky’s impolitic term “exploitation,” Stalin called this “something on the order of ‘tribute,’ something on the order of a supertax.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“In effect, he amalgamated his earlier Russocentric, great-power gospel of socialism in one country with the programmatic content of high-speed industrialization and collectivization; yet he was flexible on certain points or adopted a moderate tone so as to allay fears concerning the possible implications of this program. A landmark in the arguing of the case was Stalin’s principal address during the Central Committee plenum of July 4–12, 1928.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The prescribed harsh emergency measures, reminiscent of War Communism’s forcible grain requisitions, would predictably stimulate greater peasant recalcitrance the next time around, which in turn would stimulate and justify more radical measures culminating in the mass collectivization campaign on which Stalin’s sights were set; and so it went in reality in 1928–29.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Stalin’s championship of the “Uralo-Siberian method of grain procurement,” as he himself later called it, has rightly been described as a great turning-point in Russian history, since “it upset once and for all the delicate psychological balance upon which the relations between party and peasants rested. . . .”[”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“When they objected that this would be an “emergency measure” for which the judges and prosecutors were not prepared, Stalin said: “Let’s allow that it will be an emergency measure. So what?” Emergency measures would give splendid results, he went on, and any court workers unprepared to apply them should be purged. As for the danger that the kulaks would react by sabotaging next year’s grain deliveries, sabotage was an ever-present danger, and the solution lay in still further measures. Specifically, the organizing of collective and state farms (kolkhozy and sovkhozy). Soviet industry must be made independent of kulak caprice by setting up enough collective and state farms in the next three or four years to provide the state with at least a third of its grain requirement.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“whereas the local officials were responding to the situation in the NEP spirit, he responded in the spirit of War Communism. Informed that the kulaks were withholding their grain surplus in expectation of threefold higher prices, he directed the officials to demand surrender of the stocks at existing prices and, in the event of refusal, to confiscate them, distributing 25 per cent to poorer peasants at fixed low prices or on credit—a throwback to the “committees of the poor.” Further, he ordered the officials to bring the recalcitrant to justice under Article 107 of the Criminal Code, prescribing stiff punishments for activities defined as “speculation.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“He spent the next three weeks in the Siberian centers of Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, and Omsk conferring with local party and government officials and dictating the line they were to follow. Here at last he found an opportunity to practice the “Leninist hardness” that he had foreseen would be necessary in the revolutionary process of building Soviet socialism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Stalin chose Siberia as his destination on what must have seemed—as his train pulled out of Moscow on January 15, 1928—a rerun of his grain-expediting mission of a decade ago to Tsaritsyn.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“At the end of 1927 and in the early months of 1928 the Soviet regime was confronted with a critical shortage of grain procurements. Among the reasons for peasant withholding of grain from the market was an intensified goods famine brought on in part by fiscal policies espoused earlier under the influence of Bukharinist low-price philosophy.[614] In an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Thus was Stalin’s call for collective farming incorporated into official policy, causing the Fifteenth Congress to be described in later party histories as the “congress of collectivization.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929