All Quotes

"Stalin was, Mr. Montefiore, writes, “that rare combination: both ‘intellectual’ and killer.” The roots of violence ran deep in his family life and in Gori, his hometown, where street brawling was the principal sport. Soso, as Stalin, born Josef Djugashvili, was called, suffered savage beatings from both his alcoholic father and his doting mother, who alternated smothering affection with harsh corporal punishment. When Stalin, later in life, asked his mother why she had beaten him so much, she replied, “It didn’t do you any harm.” A brilliant but rebellious student at the religious schools he attended, and a published poet of great promise, Soso took up radical politics while still in his teens, his approach already shaped by the tactics of the seminary's administration — “surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings,” as he later described them."

"Stalin was better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders."

"One of the stories they told me during my visit concerned the fate of German Communists, many of them Jewish, who had been in exile in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. As a sort of perverse good-will gesture, Stalin handed these German Communists over to the Gestapo after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. They were, of course, immediately sent to concentration camps."

"The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind."

"The Soviet leaders accused Comrade Stalin of allegedly interfering in other parties, of imposing the views of the Bolshevik Party upon others. We can bear witness to the fact that at no time did comrade Stalin do such a thing towards us, towards the Albanian people and the Party of Labor of Albania, he always behaved as a great Marxist, as an outstanding internationalist, as a comrade, brother and sincere friend of the Albanian people. In 1945, when our people were threatened with starvation, comrade Stalin ordered the ships loaded with grain destined for the Soviet people, who also were in dire need of food at that time, and sent the grain at once to the Albanian people. Whereas, the present Soviet leaders permit themselves these ugly deeds."

"Did Stalin make mistakes? Of course he did. In so long a period filled with heroism, trials, struggle, triumphs, it is inevitable not only for Joseph Stalin personally but also for the leadership as a collective body to make mistakes. Which is the party and who is the leader that can claim to have made no mistakes in their work? When the existing leadership of the Soviet Union is criticized, the comrades of the Soviet leadership advise us to look ahead and let bygones be bygones, they tell us to avoid polemics, but when it comes to Stalin, they not only did not look ahead but they turned right round, completely backward, in order to track down only the weak spots in Stalin's work."

"The cult of the individual of Stalin should, of course be overcome. But can it be said, as it has been claimed, that Stalin himself was the sponsor of this cult of the individual? The cult of the individual should be overthrown without fail, but was it necessary and was it right to go to such lengths as to point the finger at any one who mentioned Stalin's name, to look askance at any one who used a quotation from Stalin with great speed and zeal? Certain persons smashed statues raised to Stalin and changed the names of cities that had been named after him. But why go any further?"

"We are asked by the supporters of Stalin's government to believe that the best and shortest road to liberty is through military servitude; that the most suitable preparation for responsible self-government is a tyranny employing police espionage, delation, legalized terrorism and press censorship; that the proper education for future freemen and peace-lovers is that which was and is still being used by Prussian militarists."

"He wants to turn the whole world upside down. If you hadn't taken him to school he'd be a craftsmen, now he's in prison. I'll kill such a son with my own hands, he's disgraced me."

"Every time they say that what's happening in the country is... Stalin's fault. It's the moral of every speech: Stalin's guilty, it was Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, everyone against him. But Stalin died 35 years ago! 35 years! What does that have to do with today's troubles?"

"First, Stalin is disowned, now, little by little, it gets to prosecute socialism, the October Revolution, and in no time they will also want to prosecute Lenin and Marx."

"Iosif Vissarionovich was a really cautious man. Really cautious. A man who could see far."

"Without Stalin's politics, we would never have achieved anything, we would all have died."

"Trotsky, and all that Trotsky represented, was Stalin's real fear."

"Comrade Koba told you that we were against you and demanded your sacking from the Committee, but I promise nothing of the sort happened and everything Koba told you was a malicious lie! Yes: a calumny to discredit us! I just wonder at the man's impudence. I know how worthless he is, but I didn't expect such "courage." But it turns out that he'll use any means if he thinks the ends justify them. The end in this case — the ambition — is to present himself as a great man before the nation. But ... God didn't grant him the right gifts, so he has to resort to intrigues, lies and other "bagatelles." Such a filthy person wanted to pollute our sacred mission with sewage!"

"Men of all political beliefs, friends and adversaries, must today recognise the immense stature of Joseph Stalin. He is a giant of history and his memory will not know sunset."

"A historical and ideological fact that I consider almost a "proof" of loyalty in the bolshevism ideals: the matter of Stalin. Distrust those who disparage or even forget the figure of the continuer of Lenin's work, who was able to build socialism in the USSR and defeat the Nazi beast."

"The negative characteristics of Stalin, which, in Lenin's time, were only incipient, transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin, which caused untold harm to our party. We have to consider seriously and analyse correctly this matter in order that we may preclude any possibility of a repetition in any form whatever of what took place during the life of Stalin, who absolutely did not tolerate collegiality in leadership and in work, and who practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything which opposed him, but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts. Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed these concepts or tried to prove his viewpoint and the correctness of his position was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th party congress, when many prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism."

"Stalin knew just what it was he wanted when he came to Teheran, and he got it. Stalin is a stark realist, and there is no foolishness about him. He speaks briefly and directly to the point- not a wasted word."

"A democracy can be highly illiberal, while on the other hand an absolute ruler could be a thorough liberal—without being for this reason the least bit democratic. Even a dictator, theoretically, could be a liberal. [...] A purely military dictatorship based on the bayonets and sabres of a handful of professional soldiers has greater liberal potentialities (one has only to compare Franco, Oliveira Salazar and Pétain with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin)."

"The German-Soviet pact was...a shameless exhibition, on Stalin's part, of complete indifference to the fate of the working-class outside the Soviet Union: and the attack on Finland, like the absorption of the Baltic Republics, was an example of strategic imperialism."

"As regards nationalism I am fully in agreement with you that we ought to take this up more seriously. We have a marvellous Georgian who has sat down to write a big article for Prosveshcheniye, for which he has collected all the Austrian and other materials."

"Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc."

"Humans beings do respond to love; they do have a feeling for truth and justice, they do dislike authority and repression; they do have prejudices against murder... The Stalin Regime has done its best to bring out in the Russians the reverse of the feelings listed above."

"Stalin was to a remarkable degree in the tradition of the great Czars even to the extent of the paranoiac excesses which he shared with Ivan."

"We were slaves in Egypt, my mother said, and today we're slaves of Stalin, exiled to hard labor in the Siberian taiga, without rights and without the slightest hope of rescue."

"You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist."

"Both anti-fascism and anti-communism have utterly lost their meaning since Hitler and Stalin have ceased to conceal their alliance from the world. [...] I predicted the cooperation between the Nazis and Bolsheviks as early as 1925 in my article "Anti-Marxism.""

"The fact that the capitalists and entrepreneurs [in Germany], faced with the alternative of Communism or Nazism, chose the latter, does not require any further explanation. They preferred to live as shop managers under Hitler than to be "liquidated" as "bourgeois" by Stalin."

"I was frankly horrified at the architectural exhibition that the U.S.S.R. has been showing in Detroit. Nothing that Trotsky could say against Stalin's regime is half as eloquent as the self-confession of this architecture: the same bastard classicism that the financiers and imperialists of Nineteen Hundred in America conjured up as emblem of their power. Only one thing was more sickening than these dead forms: the dishonest apologetics that accompanied them."

"But the privation, especially of the upper and middle-class peasantry, was very great, and often it seemed that the whole ambitious scheme would collapse, and perhaps carry the Soviet Government with it. It required immense courage to hold on. Many prominent Bolsheviks thought that the strain and suffering caused by the agricultural programme were too great and there should be a relaxation. But not so Stalin. Grin-fly and silently he held on. He was no talker, he hardly spoke in public. He seemed to be the iron image of an inevitable fate going ahead to the predestined goal. And something of his courage and determination spread among the members of the Communist Party and other workers in Russia."

"We are dismayed at this death because of the void that Joseph Stalin leaves in his people and in humanity as a whole. Gentlemen, if you abandon your political hostilities for a moment, as I am abandoning them at this moment, you must recognise with me that this man's life coincided for thirty years with the course of humanity itself."

"Nowadays he's depicted as a reciprocal of Hitler, his name serves the purpose of fighting communism. Yet just remembering him makes the bosses tremble. He built the first socialist state and without him nazism would have won. His Russian name is translated as "steel". Stalin, terror of the fascists and of the false communists. Honor and glory to you!"

"Sir...In the early hours of this morning Marshal Stalin passed away... When we think of Marshal Stalin, all kinds of thoughts come to...my mind...looking back at these 35 years or so, many figures stand out, but perhaps no single figure has moulded and affected and influenced the history of these years more than Marshal Stalin. He became gradually almost a legendary figure, sometimes a man of mystery, at other times a person who had an intimate bond not with a few but with vast numbers of persons. He proved himself great in peace and in war. He showed an indomitable will and courage which few possess...here was a man of giant stature...who ultimately would be remembered by the way he built up his great country...but the fact remains of his building up that great country, which was a tremendous achievement, and in addition to that the remarkable fact...is that he was not only famous in his generation but...he was in a sense ‘intimate’...with vast numbers of human beings, not only the vast numbers in the Soviet Union with whom he moved in an intimate way, in a friendly way, in an almost family way...So here was this man who created in his life-time this bond of affection and admiration among vast numbers of human eings...But every one must necessarily agree about his giant stature and about his mighty achievements. So it is right that we should pay our tribute to him on this occasion because the occasion is not merely the passing away of a great figure but...in the sense of the ending of a certain era in history...Some...describe him as...[a] gentle person... Marshal Stalin was something much more than the head of a State. He was great in his own right way, whether he occupied the office or not. I believe that his influence was exercised generally in favour of peace..."

"Of course, fanatical Communists and Russophiles generally can be respected, even if they are mistaken. But for people like ourselves, who suspect that something has gone very wrong with the Soviet Union, I consider that willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty."

"I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid."

"I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there. But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the USSR was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class. Moreover, the workers and intelligentsia in a country like England cannot understand that the USSR of today is altogether different from what it was in 1917. It is partly that they do not want to understand (i.e. they want to believe that, somewhere, a really Socialist country does actually exist), and partly that, being accustomed to comparative freedom and moderation in public life, totalitarianism is completely incomprehensible to them."

"Stalin carried with him all the disadvantages of dictatorship—the excessive centralization, the pall of fear enveloping subordinates—but he brought a powerful will to bear on the Soviet war effort that motivated those around him and directed their energies. In the process he expected, and got, heroic sacrifices from his besieged people. The 'personality cult' developed around him in the 1930s made this appeal possible in wartime. It is difficult to imagine that any other Soviet leader at the time could have wrung such efforts from the population. There is a sense in which the Stalin cult was necessary to the Soviet war effort. It provided a common focus of loyalty, and promoted a growing conviction about ultimate victory. That people suspended their disbelief, that they colluded with a myth later tarnished by revelations of the brutal nature of the wartime regime, should not blind us to the fact that Stalin's grip on the Soviet Union may have helped more than it hindered the pursuit of victory."

"The chaotic conditions of 1932 and 1933, when collectivization was at its height, generated the worst famine of the century. In the grain-rich regions of the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan, peasant resistance brought on the full fury of the Party. The farmers' own food was seized, even the seed for the following year's planting. Stalin ordered the security police to seal off the whole of the Ukraine from the rest of the Soviet Union to prevent anyone from leaving or food from getting in. It was almost certainly Stalin's single most murderous act. The most recent Russian estimates indicate a death toll of 4.2 million in the Ukraine alone in 1933. Whole villages starved to death or were dispatched by epidemics to which there was scant bodily resistance. In Kazakhstan the mainly nomadic farmers were forced into crude camps and left to die. An estimated 1.7 million, almost half the population of the republic, perished in the most wretched conditions. Thousands fled across the Soviet border to escape the death camps. In total an estimated 7 million fell victim to the class war launched in the countryside. Stalin told a critic in 1933 that it was the fault of the peasantry, for waging "silent war" against the Soviet state."

"During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism didn't work" is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history."

"If, in a bad dream, we had seen all of the horrors in store for us after the war, we should have been sorry not to see Stalin go down together with Hitler: an end to the war in favour of our allies, civilized countries with democratic traditions, would have meant a hundred times less suffering for our people than that which Stalin again inflicted on it after his victory."

"The Soviet Union was, at its slender best of times, a tyranny, and during the long reign of Joseph Stalin a mechanism for killing people distinguised from the "Hitlerzeit" only by motive."

"The fate of the Italian working people was as close to Joseph Stalin's heart as the fate of his own people and that of all the peoples of the earth. He always fought for peace, aware that those who pay the highest tribute of blood and suffering, in war, are his peasants and workers. And as a good socialist, he knew that one should not want war in order to destroy what the present society has built, but should strive to transform the old society in order to build a new one. This was his firm will; this is what he fought for in his later years. He has always rejected any provocation, he has always renounced acts of force in order to defend this good that belongs not only to his people, but to all mankind."

"He ended his day well, though too early for us and for the fate of the world. His last word was one of peace. Well, at this hour that is so sad for us, we hope that this call for peace, which reflects the will of all the workers of the earth, will not fall on deaf ears, but will be taken up by all those who hold the fate of peoples in their hands."

"Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own — the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party — like first drafts of a terrible future."

"Russia's youths admire Soviet dictator Josef Stalin -- who presided over the deaths of millions of people -- and want to kick immigrants out of Russia, according to a poll released on Wednesday. The poll, carried out by the Yuri Levada Centre, was presented by two U.S. academics who called it "The Putin Generation: the political views of Russia's youth". When asked if Stalin was a wise leader, half of the 1,802 respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed he was. "Fifty-four percent agreed that Stalin did more good than bad," said Theodore Gerber, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Forty-six percent disagreed with the statement that Stalin was a cruel tyrant.""

"For Stalin, even more than for his partners, the wartime alliance constituted a marriage of convenience. He never shook off his fear that the British and Americans might sign a separate peace with Hitler—he even alluded to this concern obliquely during Churchill’s visit in October 1944—and their delays in opening a second front were seen as sinister confirmation. Having turned the Nazi tide by its own efforts, the Soviet Union, he believed, must also provide for its own postwar security; for Stalin, that meant preventing Germany from becoming a threat once again, probably by dismembering the country into small states on the pre-Bismarck model. It also required a quiescent, client state in Poland—historically the gateway for German aggression. More generally, Stalin wanted to regain Russian territories lost in World War I, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and to expand into traditional czarist areas of influence, particularly around the Black Sea (Russia’s gateway to the Mediterranean) and on the Pacific. The concept of territorial security was therefore fundamental to his regime."

"So Stalin was very different from Hitler, a true megalomaniac who lusted for world domination. But, because of both his personal background and recent Soviet experience, Stalin’s craving for security was “insatiable”—he was always seeking more territory and more influence—and this lay at the root of growing friction with the West. Furthermore, as a Marxist-Leninist, Stalin never abandoned the hope of eventual international revolution. He recognized that in the modern world change could come by political means—“today socialism is possible even under the English monarchy”—but believed that the vast upheavals of the war were part of the structural “crisis of capitalism.” For the moment, he said in January 1945, the Soviet Union had joined the “democratic” faction of capitalists against the “fascist” faction, because Hitler posed the greater threat, but “in the future” the Soviets would confront their former allies."

"In the winter of 1944–5, however, Stalin was still concentrating on victory in Europe and then on entering the war against Japan to secure his territorial aims. Moreover he knew that his shattered country was in no position for a new conflict in the immediate future. In fact he anticipated substantial economic aid, indirectly via agreed reparations from Germany and directly through a peacetime version of American lend-lease. This meant staying on good terms with his wartime allies. The Italian and French communist parties, both strongly placed because of their prominence in the wartime resistance, were warned against a revolutionary bid for power because Italy and France were both firmly in the British and American sphere. Stalin took the same line on Greece once Churchill had made clear Britain’s special interest. On the other hand, he treated the rest of the percentages deal as giving him the carte blanche he desired in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Guided by Marxist-Leninist ideology about the innate antagonisms of the capitalist powers, he was also ready to exploit policy differences between Britain and America. Roosevelt’s ostentatious digs at Churchill during the Teheran conference—intended to relieve Stalin’s suspicions of a combined Anglo-American front—seemed to confirm the aptness of this tactic. He felt he could work with the Allies while playing one off against the other."

"The surprise of Barbarossa devastated Josef Stalin. By 28 June 1941, after a week of continuous meetings, the Soviet dictator had succumbed to deep depression. Leaving the defense commissariat the next day with several Politburo members, he had burst out loudly, "Lenin left us with a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up!" A Politburo delegation that tracked him down at his dacha at the beginning of July found him sitting in an armchair staring, with a strange look on his face. By the time he rallied, the Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow. Vyachaslev Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan wrote the first war speech Stalin delivered by radio to the Soviet people, on 3 July 1941. "Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy!" he began. "I am speaking to you, my friends!" He had never spoken that way before."