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Young Stalin QUOTES

Young Stalin QUOTES

1 " It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

2 " Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

3 " The formation of Stalin’s character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

4 " Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world’s greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

5 " The murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

6 " So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

7 " Once in power, Stalin’s campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all—particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

8 " Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

9 " The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death. ‘In that case why should we bother with a People’s "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

10 " He asked, ‘How can you make a revolution without firing-squads? "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

11 " In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.180 He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that ‘the Party has made me in its own image’. He and the Party had "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

12 " When Sagirashvili accused him of propagating anti-Menshevik lies in his Pravda, ‘he would grin in a seemingly good-natured way’ and explain, in a pre-Orwellian dictum, that a ‘lie always has a stronger effect than the truth. The main thing is to "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

13 " 1847, the Emperor’s favourite, but: the Preobrazhensky Regiment... got totally drunk. The Pavlovsky, our revolutionary buttress, also couldn’t resist. We sent guards from other picked units - all got utterly drunk. We posted guards from the Regimental Committees - they succumbed as well. We despatched armoured cars to drive away the crowd, but after a while they also began to weave suspiciously. When evening came, a violent bacchanalia overflowed. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

14 " Exasperated, Antonov-Ovseenko called the Petrograd Fire Brigade. ‘We tried flooding the cellars with water - but the firemen ... got drunk instead.’ The Commissars started smashing the bottles in Palace Square, but ‘the crowd drank from the gutters. The drunken ecstasy infected the entire city. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

15 " Commissar for Justice?’ Isaak Shteinberg, a Left-SR, challenged Lenin. ‘Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat of Social Annihilation!’ ‘Well said!’ replied Lenin. ‘That’s exactly how it’s going to be! "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

16 " We must put an end once and for all,’ said Trotsky, ‘to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

17 " The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for non-existent traitors. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

18 " institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervour. "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

19 " There are two lines here: one holds a course for victory of revolution…the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely on staying as an opposition… "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin

20 " 5 THE POET AND THE PRIESTHOOD The boy of sixteen from Gori, accustomed to the freedom of fighting in the streets or climbing Gorijvari, now found himself locked for virtually every hour of the day in an institution that more resembled the most repressive nineteenth-century English public-school than a religious academy: "

― Simon Sebag Montefiore , Young Stalin