soviet-premiers

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Marxism and Freedom (1957) by Raya Dunayevskaya is a history of the process of Marx's thought, as it evolved out of eighteenth-century philosophy and Hegel's dialectic through the mass political movements of the nineteenth century, as it became adapted and modified by Engels, Trotsky, and Lenin and, finally, in Dunayevskaya's words, "totally perverted" by Stalin."

"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."

"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!"

"At the heart of the Second World War lies a giant and abiding paradox: although the western war was fought in defence of civilization and democracy, and although it needed to be fought and had to be won, the chief victor was a dictator who was as psychologically warped and capable of evil as Adolf Hitler himself."

"Russians are lucky - they have socialism and Stalin."

"The documentary and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and indisputable; the Red Army, which had behaved so heroically on the battlefield, raped the women of Germany as part of their reward, with the active collusion of their officers up to and including Stalin. Indeed he explicitly excused their behaviour on more than one occasion, seeing it as part of the rights of the conqueror. "What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?" Stalin asked Marshal Tito about the ordinary Russian soldier in April 1945. "You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be ... The important thing is that it fights Germans." As well as for the sexual gratification of the soldiers, mass rape was intended as a humiliation and revenge on Germany."

"In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. ... What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of dictatorship" is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants."

"I may say that I 'got along fine' with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people - very well indeed."

"Stalin's language is full of reminiscences of the theological seminary in which he received his training. What the world needs is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific inquiry, combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer."

"I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin."

"They [Lenin and Stalin] formed the world's first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years."

"In the name of Stalin we always won, in the name of Stalin all victories will be ours."

"We know that our struggle is not easy, that it will still be long and hard because the big capital is determined to betray the fatherland and to commit all kind of crimes just to save its privileges; yet we know that the path showed us by Stalin is the right one and that following this path we'll be able to conquer victory."

"Stalin had the capacity to reformulate utopias. Stalinism itself was a retreat: from the impulse toward European revolution that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917, to the defense of the Soviet Union after that revolution did not take place. When the Red Army failed to spread communism to Europe in 1920, Stalin had a fallback plan: socialism would be made in one country, the Soviet Union. When his Five-Year Plan to build socialism brought disaster, he presided over the starvation of millions. But he explained the events as part of the policy, and reaped the benefits as the fearsome father of the nation and the dominant figure in the politburo. After turning the NKVD against the kulaks and the national minorities in 1937-1938, he explained that this was necessary for the security of the homeland of socialism. After the retreat of the Red Army in 1941, and indeed after its victory in 1945, he appealed to Russian nationalism. When the Cold War began, he blamed Jews (and others, of course) for the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union."

"Hitler preached "superior and inferior races." Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: "Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural back-wardeness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality"."

"Those who urge an alliance with Assad cite the example of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot who became an ally of Western democracies against Nazi Germany. I never liked historical comparisons and like this one even less. To start with, the Western democracies did not choose Stalin as an ally; he was thrusted upon them by the turn of events. When the Second World War started Stalin was an ally of Hitler thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union actively participated in the opening phase of the war by invading Poland from the east as the Germans came in from the West. Before that, Stalin had rendered Hitler a big service by eliminating thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn massacre. Between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was an objective ally of Hitler. Stalin switched sides when he had no choice if he wanted to save his skin. The situation in Syria today is different. There is no alliance of democracies which, thanks to Obama’s enigmatic behavior, lack any strategy in the Middle East. Unlike Stalin, Assad has not switched sides if only because there is no side to switch to. Assad regards ISIS as a tactical ally against other armed opposition groups. This is why Russia is now focusing its air strikes against non-ISIS armed groups opposed to Assad. More importantly, Assad has none of the things that Stalin had to offer the Allies. To start with Stalin could offer the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Soviet Union and capable of swallowing countless German divisions without belching. Field Marshal von Paulus’ one-million man invasion force was but a drop in the ocean of the Soviet landmass. In contrast, Assad has no territorial depth to offer. According to the Iranian General Hossein Hamadani, who was killed in Aleppo, Assad is in nominal control of around 20 percent of the country. Stalin also had an endless supply of cannon fodder, able to ship in millions from the depths of the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. In contrast, Assad has publicly declared he is running out of soldiers, relying on Hezbollah cannon fodder sent to him by Tehran. If Assad has managed to hang on to part of Syria, it is partly because he has an air force while his opponents do not. But even that advantage has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Four years of bombing defenseless villages and towns has not changed the balance of power in Assad's favor. This may be why his Russian backers decided to come and do the bombing themselves. Before, the planes were Russian, the pilots Syrian. Now both planes and pilots are Russian, underlining Assad's increasing irrelevance. Stalin's other card, which Assad lacks, consisted of the USSR's immense natural resources, especially the Azerbaijan oilfields which made sure the Soviet tanks could continue to roll without running out of petrol. Assad in contrast has lost control of Syria's oilfields and is forced to buy supplies from ISIS or smugglers operating from Turkey. There are other differences between Stalin then and Assad now. Adulated as “the Father of the Nation” Stalin had the last word on all issues. Assad is not in that position. In fact, again according to the late Hamadani in his last interview published by Iranian media, what is left of the Syrian Ba'athist regime is run by a star chamber of shadowy characters who regard Assad as nothing but a figurehead."

"The late Leonid Krasin ... was the first, if I am not mistaken, to call Stalin an "Asiatic". In saying that, he had in mind no problematical racial attributes, but rather that blending of grit, shrewdness, craftiness and cruelty which has been considered characteristic of the statesmen of Asia. Bukharin subsequently simplified the appellation, calling Stalin "Genghis Khan", manifestly in order to draw attention to his cruelty, which has developed into brutality. Stalin himself, in conversation with a Japanese journalist, once called himself an "Asiatic", not in the old, but rather in the new sense of the word: with that personal allusion he wished to hint at the existence of common interests between the USSR and Japan as against the imperialistic West."

"The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the NEP-men, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their own ground, he speaks their language and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilize them and to move them against the Party. Right now he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers."

"Stalin's communism was Marxism as a religion, fundamentalist religion. Every word of the bible Das Kapital, everything that Marx wrote was true.... Pretty soon, empirical research to find out what was really going on was stopped altogether in the Soviet Union under Stalin. When Stalin took over he discovered that some of the sociologists in Russia were studying the motivation of workers and finding that many of the workers were soldiering on the job. Since Marx said that once the workers were rightly related to the means of production there would be no problem with motivation because the workers would own the company, Stalin decided that the sociologists were lying when they reported that many workers in the Soviet Union were soldiering on the job. Hence, he sent the sociologists into exile in Siberia. Pretty soon, empirical research to find out what was really going on was stopped altogether in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The economy kept declining because they weren't finding out what was really happening. They were taking like the fundamentalists of the American's Bible taking Das Kapital as literally true rather than as it should, I think, be taken."

"I believe that today, under the circumstances of capitalism crisis and the ever-increasing anti-communist reaction, the matter of the approach to the figure of Stalin is not historical or personal, but it's a matter of a burning current political debate. As in 1941, if you considered yourself an enemy of fascism and ready to fight against those fascist gangs, in any case you would have sided with Stalin. Those who thought differently and they considered themselves struggling again Stalinism and against Stalin, they would find themselves on the other side of the front, under the tricolour of general Vlasov."

"As a good marxist, Stalin fought against the bourgeois state, he took charge of its destruction to its very foundations, and then, after destroying the society of exploitation and violence, he built the state of the working class and the farmers on its base."

"The proletarian internationalism of Stalin, as a marxist, wasn't questioned even from his fierce rivals in the ranks of the imperialists (as Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt), while, on this matter, their modern followers still remember the "terrible hand of Moscow", as in the Comintern, in every place on the planet."

"Under the direction of Stalin and the CPSU, the Soviet Union achieved great successes and defeated the most repulsive product of capitalism: the 20th century's fascism."

"I am a marxist, a leninist and I don't even consider disagreeable Stalin, who saved us from Hitler, more than the United States."

"The more power he had, the more power he accumulated and kept in his hands, the more power he wanted."

"I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved and self-centred fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer of power. [...] I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard—possibly doctrinaire—and self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had never completely emerged from its native mountain glen. Yet I had had to recognize that under him Russia was not being merely tyrannized over and held down; it was being governed and it was getting on. [...] All such shadowy undertow, all suspicion of hidden emotional tensions, ceased for ever, after I had talked to him for a few minutes. [...] I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia."

"We think that Stalin's contribution to the revolution is much more important than the mistakes he made. To use the Chinese way, the score for Stalin would be thirty percent to seventy percent: thirty for his errors and seventy for his merits. Furthermore, Chairman Mao agreed with me on the question of Stalin's score, and, after the twentieth Congress of the CPSU, members of the Communist Party of China expressed a very clear judgment of Stalin."

"Generalissimo Stalin directed every move... made every decision... He is the greatest and wisest military genius who ever lived..."

"I consider him one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality."

"I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen .... The idea of killing Stalin filled my thougths and feelings .... We studied the 'technical' possibillities of an attack .... We even practiced. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn't that a crime? When Stalin was still alive, I saw things differently, but as I look back over this century, I can state that Stalin was the greatest individual of this century, the greatest political genius. To adopt a scientific attitude about someone is quite different from one's personal attitude."

"Stalin will be rehabilitated, needless to say."

"Stalin is the best brain in polities today. Rut that does not mean that I have become a Bolshevik."