Quotations

Lenin was the most influential, most diabolical figure of the 20th century.

Martin Malia

Stalin’s era is a direct continuation of Lenin’s.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Everything flows, everything changes, it is impossible to step twice into the same transport.

Vassily Grossman

Surrounded by red and brown currents, it is a miracle that Hungary still exists.

Margit Slachta

Communism begins where atheism begins.

Marx

It takes a great ideal to produce a great crime!

Martin Malia

I don’t know one, I can’t see the other, and as for the third – I don’t remember.

Chaim Potok

Every member of the party must be an agent of the CHEKA.

Lenin

Dictatorship means nothing more or less than unrestricted power absolutely unimpeded by laws or regulations and resting directly on force.

Lenin

The aim is not to convince, but to confuse the opponent.

Lenin

The theory and practice of the totalitarian state are the greatest challenge which man has been called on to meet in the course of civilised history.

Arthur Koestler

We Communists are people of a special cut.

Stalin

Telling the truth is a bourgeois prejudice.

Lenin

Stalin died without previous planning, without instructions from the administrative apparatus. Stalin died without personal instructions by Comrade Stalin. In this freedom and spontaneity, this capriciousness of death, there was something explosive, something contradictory to the innermost essence of the Soviet state. Confusion seized minds and hearts.

Vassily Grossman

We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will honourably fulfil your commandment!

Stalin

Let no one be spared!

Lenin

Calm down! We are not killing anyone now.

“The Death of Stalin” (film, 2017)

Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

Lenin

Terror is just both in principle and in practice, and it is based on and legitimised by

revolutionary necessity.

Lenin

Morality is what serves communist politics.

Lenin

We must always make the bourgeoisie feel guilty, because it has a conscience.

Lenin

We must give an unexpected push to that which is falling, but not with our own hands.

Lenin

Soviet power is organised civil war.

Trotsky

The communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Marx