Russian Communists

"An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders."

"Who can think that this eviction of Germans was undertaken only as a temporary experiment? Those who adopted the decision on the eviction of the Germans from these territories, and who understood that Poles from other Polish districts would at once move into these territories, cannot suggest after a while to carry out reverse measures. The very idea of involving millions of people in such experiments is unbelievable, quite apart from the cruelty of it, both towards the Poles and the Germans themselves."

"Our scientists all the more occupy advanced positions in the development of world science. By the example of their successes in the field of atomic energy, our scientists and technicians have vividly shown how much the increased might of the Soviet state and the further growth of its international authority depends on their efforts and practical successes."

"The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to turn out."

"Havoc and ruin had been around him all of his days, either impending on himself or dealt by him to others. Certainly in Molotov the Soviet machine had found a capable and in many ways characteristic representative — always the faithful Party man and Communist disciple. How glad I am at the end of my life not to have had to endure the stresses which he has suffered; better to never have been born. In the conduct of foreign affairs, Mazarin, Talleyrand, Metternich, would welcome him to their company, if there be another world to which Bolsheviks allow themselves to go."

"This is not the first time that our people have had to deal with an attack of an arrogant foe. At the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia our people’s reply was war for the fatherland, and Napoleon suffered defeat and met his doom. It will be the same with Hitler, who in his arrogance has proclaimed a new crusade against our country. The Red Army and our whole people will again wage victorious war for the fatherland, for our country, for honor, for liberty. The government of the Soviet Union expresses the firm conviction that the whole population of our country, all workers, peasants and intellectuals, men and women, will conscientiously perform their duties and do their work. Our entire people must now stand solid and united as never before. Each one of us must demand of himself and of others discipline, organization and self-denial worthy of real Soviet patriots, in order to provide for all the needs of the Red Army, Navy and Air Force, to insure victory over the enemy. The government calls upon you, citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally still more closely around our glorious Bolshevist party, around our Soviet Government, around our great leader and comrade, Stalin. Ours is a righteous cause. The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours."

"Only a fool would attack us."

"We cannot lose Poland. If this line is crossed, they will grab us, too."

"Germany, which has lately united 80 million Germans, has submitted certain neighboring countries to her supremacy and gained military strength in many aspects, and thus has become, as clearly can be seen, a dangerous rival to principal imperialistic powers in Europe — England and France. That is why they declared war on Germany on a pretext of fulfilling the obligations given to Poland. It is now clearer than ever, how remote the real aims of the cabinets in these countries were from the interests of defending the now disintegrated Poland or Czechoslovakia."

"Events arising out of the Polish-German War have revealed the internal insolvency and obvious impotence of the Polish state. Polish ruling circles have suffered bankruptcy.... Warsaw as the capital of the Polish state no longer exists. No one knows the whereabouts of the Polish Government. The population of Poland have been abandoned by their ill-starred leaders to their fate. The Polish State and its Government have virtually ceased to exist. In view of this state of affairs, treaties concluded between the Soviet Union and Poland have ceased to operate. A situation has arisen in Poland which demands of the Soviet Government especial concern for the security of its State. Poland has become a fertile field for any accidental and unexpected contingency that may create a menace for the Soviet Union.... Nor can it be demanded of the Soviet Government that it remain indifferent to the fate of its Blood Brothers, the Ukrainians and White Russians inhabiting Poland, who even formerly were nations without rights and who now have been utterly abandoned to their fate. The Soviet Government deems it its sacred duty to extend the hand of assistance to its brother Ukrainians and White Russians inhabiting Poland."

"Recently the ones in charge of England and France are trying to portray themselves as fighters for democratic rights of nations against Hitlerism, and more than that, the English government declared that supposedly the very goal of the war is "destruction of Hitlerism". The conlcusion is that English and French proponents of war declared something like an "ideological war", similar to the old religious wars... However, such a war has no justification for itself. The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be acknowledged or rejected, it is a matter of political views. But anyone will grasp that an ideology can not be destroyed by force, a war can not put an end to it. For that reason it is not only futile, but also criminal to fight such a war as the war "for the destruction of Hitlerism" while covering yourself with false banner of "fighting for democracy"..."

"As long as we live in a system of states, and as long as the roots of fascism and imperialist aggression have not finally been extirpated, our vigilance in regard to possible new violators of peace should not slacken, and concern for the strengthening of cooperation between the peace-loving powers will continue to be our most important duty."

"Infallible people do not exist, Lenin used to say. It depends, first, on the kind of error and, second, how long it persisted. And whether there was willingness to pursue the line considered correct. If there was such willingness, certain errors had to be passed over.""

"[W]e've done so much that even if we are smashed, everything will have been worth it. If not today, then tomorrow."

"I do not believe that everything we did under Stalin was right. But the main thing we achieved gives us justifiable pride. Had we been conquered, we would have had to wait a long time for liberation."

"We also had a defeat in 1905 but we triumphed in 1917. We wouldn't have won in 1917 if it hadn't been for 1905. This should be taken into consideration. This should be understood. Some say, give us victory now! If not, it's no good. Tea drinkers. They want everything handed to them in a tea saucer."

"In capitalist countries the bourgeoisie leads. So long as imperialism and socialism are locked in struggle with each other, it's either a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or a dictatorship of the working class."

"Life has improved, and now as never before the doors to a happy and cultured life for all the peoples of our Union stand wide open. We are already enjoying the first fruits of our victory and we see that an unparalleled rise in the standard of living and culture of all the peoples of the Soviet Union awaits us. And in spite of all this, we have not yet seen the last of people who in their blind hatred of the new world are planning the seizure and dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Well, what shall we say to them? It is true that we appeared in the world without the permission of these gentlemen, and undoubtedly against their wishes.... This means that the time has come when the old world must make way for the new."

"Stalin will be rehabilitated, needless to say."

"Someone helped us a lot with the atomic bomb. The intelligence (service) played a huge role. These Rosenbergs suffered in America. It is not excluded that they helped us. But we shouldn't really speak about it, because we might receive this kind of help in the future."

"The transformation of numerous intermediaries into a handful of monopolists represents one of the fundamental processes in the transformation of capitalism into capitalist imperialism."

"The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as an intermediary in the making of payments. In doing so they transform inactive money capital into active capital, that is, into capital producing a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class."

"Nobody is to be blamed for being born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews a striving for freedom but justifies and eulogies his slavery (e.g., calls the throttling of Poland and the Ukraine, etc., a "defense of the fatherland" of the Great Russians") - such a slave is a lickspittle and a boor, who arouses a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing."

"Crises of every kind - economic crises more frequently, but not only these - in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly"

"The statement that cartels can abolish crises is a fable spread by bourgeois economists who at all costs desire to place capitalism in a favorable light. On the contrary, when monopoly appears in certain branches of industry, it increases and intensifies the anarchy inherent in capitalist production as a whole."

"Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., ninth-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression an the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar's butchers, the nobles and the capitalists."

"And, indeed, there could not be any other grouping among our students, because they are the most responsive section of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole."

"Capitalism in its imperialist stage arrives at the threshold of the most complete socialization of production. In spite of themselves the capitalists are dragged, as it were, into the new social order, which marks the transition from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable."

"It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain."

"When we say that experience and reason prove that men are not equal, we mean by equality, equality in abilities or similarity in physical strength and mental ability. It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism."

"It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies."

"Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker."

"It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow all of them. To be able to do this, socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is, in three respects, a war between slave-holders with the aim of consolidating slavery."

"Terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror."

"To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a “fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat” is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle."

"Not a parliamentary republic—to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step—but a republic of Soviets."

"The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers' Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government."

"Social-chauvinism is advocacy of the idea of "defense of the fatherland: in the present war. This idea logically leads to the abandonment of the class struggle during the war, to voting for war credits, etc. In fact, the social-chauvinists are pursuing an anti-proletarian bourgeois policy, for they are actually championing, not "defense of the fatherland" in the sense of combating foreign oppression, but the "right" of one or other "Great" Powers to plunder colonies and to oppress other nations. The social-chauvinists reiterate the bourgeois deception of the people that the war is being waged to protect the freedom and existence of nations, thereby taking sides with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat."

"In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace."

"In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia's part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible."

"The interests of the working class and of its struggle against capitalism demand complete solidarity and the closest unity of the workers of all nations; they demand resistance to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie of every nationalist."

"Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this “commodity”, they cannot change the conditions which, convert labour-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement."

"You must side with one of the two immensely wealthy and immensely powerful groups of imperialist predators - that is how capitalist reality poses the basic issue of present-day foreign policy."

"Popular ignorance of foreign policy is incomparably greater than of domestic policy."

"We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either. We are fighting on the ground of a definite state; we unite the workers of all nations living in this state; we cannot vouch for any particular path of national development, for we are marching to our class goal along all possible paths."

"No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from domestic policy."

"The "Jacobins" of the twentieth century would not guillotine the capitalists - to follow a good example does not mean copying it. It would be enough to arrest fifty to a hundred financial magnates and bigwigs, the chief knights of embezzlement and of robbery by the banks. It would be enough to arrest them for a few weeks to expose their frauds and show all exploited people " who needs the war." Upon exposing the frauds of the banking barons, we could release them, placing the banks, the capitalist syndicates, and all the contractors "working" for the government under workers' control."

"Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it."

"For any truth, if overdone (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity."

"It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie."