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October Revolution Quotes

Browse 18 quotes about October Revolution.

October Revolution Quotes

“This investigation has shown that many of the widespread interpretations about the Russian Revolution have either no basis in fact or, at best, are ideologically motivated exaggerations. We could find no evidence for example that there was anything in the DNA of Bolshevism that would lead it to consciously and deliberately undermine proletarian power from the start. On the contrary they did all they could to encourage it for the first 6 months. Such accusations of course are made by those who already know the story ended badly, but to leave out the positive achievements of those early months is a distortion which denies the achievements of the working class in Russia.”

SocialismCommunismSoviet RussiaBolsheviksRussian RevolutionOctober RevolutionLeft Communism
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?”

CommunismMarxismOctober Revolution1973Dictatorship Of The ProletariatMeans Of Production1930WreckingPrompartyThe Law Matures
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“It is true that those of us who have political experience could wrestle for power just as any other politician. But we have no time; we have more important things to do. And there is no doubt that the knowledge we hold to be sacred would be lost in the process. To acquire power, millions of people have to be fed illusions. This too is true: Lenin won over millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian Revolution would have been impossible, with a slogan which was at variance with the basic collective tendencies of the Russian party. The slogan was: "Take the land of the large land-owners. It is to be your individual property." And the peasants followed. They would not have offered their allegiance if they had been told in 1917 that this land would one day be collectivized. The truth of this is attested to by the bitter fight for the collectivization of Russian agriculture around 1930. In social life there are degrees of power and degrees of falsity. The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be; the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be.”

Masses1969Power PoliticsPost TruthOctober RevolutionCollectivization
Book:The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”

AnarchismBolsheviksOctober Revolution
Book:My Disillusionment in Russia
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“Conspiracy theories explaining the Bolshevik victory gained widespread credence: the most popular of these was that of international Jewish conspiracy, since Trotsky, Zinoviev, and a number of other Bolshevik leaders were Jewish; but another theory, revived in Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich, pictured the Bolsheviks as pawns of the Germans in a successful plot to take Russia out of the war. (...) the attitudes that enabled such theories to flourish may also have influenced Western scholarly approaches to the problem.”

Conspiracy TheoriesOctober Revolution
Book:The Russian Revolution 1917-1932
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“It may well be that the Bolsheviks' greatest strength in 1917 was not strict party organization and discipline (which scarcely existed at this time) but rather the party's stance of intransigent radicalism on the extreme left of the political spectrum. While other socialist and liberal groups jostled for position in the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet, the Bolsheviks refused to be co-opted and denounced the politics of coalition and compromise. While other formerly radical politicians called for restraint and responsible, statesmanlike leadership, the Bolsheviks stayed out on the streets with the irresponsible and belligerent revolutionary crowd. As the 'dual power' structure disintegrated, discrediting the coalition parties represented in the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet leadership, only the Bolsheviks were in a position to benefit. Among the socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks had overcome Marxist scruples, caught the mood of the crowd, and declared their willingness to seize power in the name of the proletarian revolution.”

BolsheviksOctober Revolution
Book:The Russian Revolution 1917-1932
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“But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.”

RussiaStalinOctober RevolutionTsereteli
Book:October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
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“The early days of revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days everyone was, or claimed to be, a socialist. No one wanted to be bourgeois.”

RussiaOctober Revolution
Book:October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
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“Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.”

KnowsWorldFirstsWellsKindHas BeensStatesCommonKnownKnow HowSpecialTheoryRevolutionCapitalismBasesDisguiseSocialistWell KnownBoastOctoberScientific TheoryYugoslaviaEngelsOctober RevolutionLenin And Stalin
Author:Enver Hoxha
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“No one revolution up to now has brought all that was expected of it by the masses. Hence the inevitability of a certain disillusionment, of a lowering of the activity of the vanguard, and consequently, of the growing importance of the rearguard. [Joseph] Stalin's faction has raised itself on the wave of reaction against the October revolution.”

CertainGrowingRevolutionActivityMassImportanceRaisedWaveExpectedReactionsOctoberDisillusionmentInevitabilityFactionsVanguardOctober Revolution
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform”

WorldWarResultsEconomicCenturyObjectsStrangeRevolutionCapitalismPlanningReformIronyWar Of The WorldsLastingProvidingPopularityIncentivesProceduresOctoberSecond World WarAntagonistOctober Revolution
Author:Eric Hobsbawm
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