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Stalin Quotes

Browse 65 quotes about Stalin.

Stalin Quotes

“For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!”

WarLibertyRevolutionCivil WarDictatorshipSelf DeceptionHitlerRussian RevolutionStalinOrgoneEmotional PlagueLavalPetain
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“I’m coming round to the belief that colonialism hasn’t been a harsh enough school for them, that it hasn’t taught them enough about things — that French colonialism has, in spite of everything, treated nature with a certain respect. They’ve still got a lot to learn, and French people don’t give that kind of lesson. The men of their own race will take care of that. One day they’ll have their Stalins, their Hitlers, and their Napoleons, their Fuhrers and their Duces, and then their very blood will cry out to demand respect for nature. That day they will understand.”

Human NatureCivilizationColonialismHitlerViolence In SocietyStalinLessons Of LifeCivilization Vs Nature
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.”

HumanityHolocaustWwiiSecond World WarHitlerStalinScholars
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“Tadas was sent to the principal today," announced Jonas at dinner. He wedged a huge piece of sausage into his small mouth. "Why?" I asked. "Because he talked about hell," sputtered Jonas, juice from the plump sausage dribbling down his chin. "Jonas, don't speak with your mouth full. Take smaller pieces," scolded Mother. "Sorry," said Jonas with his moth stuffed. "It's good." He finished chewing. I took a bite of sausage. It was warm and the skin was deliciously salty. "Tadas told one of the girls that hell is the worst place ever and there's no escape for all eternity." "Now why would Tadas be talking of hell?" asked Papa, reaching for the vegetables. "Because his father told him that if Stalin comes to Lithuania, we'll all end up there.”

HellStalinLithuania
Book:Between Shades of Gray
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“I will die in Moscow, not seeing Ukraina. Before death, I will ask Stalin to extract my heart, just before I am burnt in the crematory, from my chest and bury it in my native land, in Kyiv, somewhere above the Dnipro on the mountain-hill. Fate, send happiness to people on this ruined and bloodstained land! Disappear, hatred! Evanesce, poverty!”

HeartDeathHatredUkraineMoscowNative LandStalinKyivDnipro RiverCrematory
Book:Щоденникові записи, 1939-1956 / Дневниковые записи, 1939-1956
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“What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.”

WarRevengeGenocideWorld War IiHolocaustNazismPolandEthnic CleansingJewsAntisemitismStalinismStalinGermansEastern EuropeanErnest Gellner
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Stalin formulated the economic aims of socialism as: “The securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole society.” [Economic Problems of Socialism in U.S.S.R., English edition, p. 45.] Taken positively, this has no more content than any metaphysical slogan; like the slogan “All men are equal,” it expresses its point of view through negations. “Constantly rising” requirements means that there is no foreseeable limit to the possible rise in productivity (for, of course, it is not so much the needs as the means to satisfy them that will continually increase). “Cultural” requirements means that growing wealth is not to be confined to physical goods (though these alone enter into the Marxist definition of output). “The whole society” implies a condemnation of the arbitrary distribution of wealth. There is nothing in this that the orthodox economists can object to. Indeed, it takes the very words out of their mouth. But they were wont to excuse the inequality generated by private property in the means of production because it was necessary to make total income greater. If income grows faster without it, they are in an awkward situation. Perhaps this is why they have crept off to hide in thickets of algebra and left the torch of ideology to be carried by the political argument that capitalist institutions are the bulwark of liberty. [pp. 109-110]”

SocialismInequalityPrivate PropertyStalinOrthodox Economists
Book:Economic philosophy
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“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”

HistoryIsraelRevengeIdeologyCommunismPolandJewsNazisEastern EuropeHungaryAntisemitismStalinCzechoslovakiaEast GermanySecret PoliceCamusRed ArmyGermansJewish DiasporaDavid Szmulevski
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Returning to Washington,FDR declared that Yalta Conference had put and end to the kind of balance-of-power divisions that had long marred global politics. His assessment echoed Woodrow Wilson's idealistic and equally inaccurate claims at the end of World War I. In London, Churchill told his cabinet that "poor Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." Soviet-British friendship, Churchill maintained, "would continue as long as Stalin was in charge.”

HitlerStalinChurchillFdrYalta
Book:Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
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“The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk”

AmericaRomanceMotherPoliticsFamilyFeminismMotherhoodLove StoryCommunismSovietSoviet UnionMoscowSoviet RussiaStalinDoctor ZhivagoBased On Real EventsBased On A True StorySoviet Literature20th Century RussiaPolitical DramaBrookyln
Author:Sana Krasikov
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“Hopkins’ cruciale ‘noodzaak tot vriendschap’ leidde tot vreemde en schemerige situaties. De Lend-Leaseleveringen aan de Britten stonden onder scherp toezicht, bij de Russen was daarvan geen sprake. Het Congres kreeg er geen greep op, wie te veel vragen stelde – zoals Ivan Yeaton, de alerte ambassademedewerker bij Hopkins’ bezoek aan Moskou – kreeg problemen met het Witte Huis. Grofweg kregen de Russen, met een totaal van 11 miljard dollar, bijna driemaal zoveel als de Britten met hun 4,3 miljard. In tegenstelling tot de Britten betaalden ze daar niets voor terug.”

RussiaWorld War IiGreat BritainStalinRooseveltHarry HopkinsLend Lease
Author:Geert Mak
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“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely wverything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”

SocialismCommunismGenocideMarxismMaoBlmMarxStalinAntifaLenin
Book:The War on the West
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“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”

SocialismCommunismGenocideMarxismMaoBlmMarxStalinAntifaLenin
Book:The War on the West
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“But he knew his Boss. One must never work full force for Stalin, never go all out. He did not tolerate the flat failure to carry out his orders, but he hated thoroughly successful performance because he saw in it a diminution of his own uniqueness. No one but himself must be able to do anything flawlessly. So even when he seemed to be straining in harness, Abakumov was pulling at half-strength—and so was everyone else. Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”

MediocrityAuthoritarianism1968StalinAbakumov
Book:The First Circle
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“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty] One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

LoveInspirationalPhilosophyEarthLawDeathHopeJusticeAtheismHolySacredAtheistAutobiographyDescendantsHegelObituaryOrchidsStalinTrotskyJoseph StalinLeon TrotskyIronistRichard RortyGlobal CivilizationRichard Rorty ObituaryStrict Atheist
Author:Jürgen Habermas
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“Rivera’s admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford. By the 1920s and ‘30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford’s engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car; his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly; and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. Kahn, the architect of Ford’s factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford’s industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit’s industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.”

EconomicsSocialismCommunismProductionStalinAssembly LineIndustrialismAutomobilesDiego RiveraHenry Ford
Author:Linda Downs
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“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”

CommunismSoviet UnionDialecticsUssrStalinHistorical MaterialismMarxism LeninismHistorical Science
Book:Dialectical and Historical Materialism
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“Krushchev himself is 'revealed' not as an honest communist but instead as a political leader seeking personal advantage while hiding behind an official persona of idealism and probity, a type familiar in capitalist countries. Taking into account his murder of Beria and the men executed as 'Beria's gang' in 1953, he seems worse still - a political thug. Krushchev was guilty IN REALITY of the kinds of crimes he DELIBERATELY AND FALSELY accused Stalin of in the 'Secret Speech'.”

Soviet UnionSoviet RussiaStalinSoviet HistoryKrushchev
Book:Khrushchev Lied
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“Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.”

SocialismCommunismSoviet RussiaStalinLeninTrotskyLeft CommunismKamenevZinoviev
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“Los revolucionarios de antes buscaban transformar el ambiente social con la esperanza (cuando se trataba de idealistas y no de detentadores de poder) de cambiar la naturaleza humana. Los próximos revolucionarios concentrarán su ataque sobre la naturaleza humana tal la cual la encuentren, en las mentes y cuerpos de sus víctimas o, si lo prefieren de sus beneficiarios.”

SocialismoComunismoSjwStalinChavismoTiraníaProgresismoLgbti
Book:Si mi biblioteca ardiera esta noche. Ensayos sobre arte, música, literatura y otras drogas
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“Unfortunately, Stalin's collected works contain very little mention of his early comrades. Ketskhoveli's relationship with Stalin must be inferred from the accounts of third parties. Official biographers evidently thought it unseemly to dwell too much on the connection between the leader of the Soviet Union and a tertiary figure, who figured only in the history of Georgian Social Democracy for about a decade and then died in prison in a quixotic gesture in 1903. The historical literature about Stalin is patently designed to create parallels between him and Lenin and, whenever possible, links. Thus, Stalin had to be no less a leader in Tbilisi than Lenin had been in St. Petersburg. In the official version Stalin is already first among equals in his relationship with the central figures of Brzdola (The Struggle), the underground Georgian Marxist organ. But by his own admission, in 1898 he was still an apprentice seeking sponsorship and advice from the leaders of Georgian Marxism.”

PropagandaStalinRevisionist History19901898
Book:Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power
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“If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.”

RussiaSoviet UnionStalinChechnyaChechen
Book:Gulag: A History
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“Some searched for metaphors to describe what had happened. Tetiana Pavlychka remembered that her sister Tamara “had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people — they were more like starving ghosts.” Another survivor remembered that his mother “looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen . . . was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.” A third remembered his brother lying down, “alive but completely swollen, his body shining as if it were made of glass”.”

CommunismUkraineStarvationFamineBolsheviksStalinCollectivizationHolodomor
Book:Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
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“Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.”

CommunismTyrantsDictatorshipReligious IntoleranceStalinismStalinDictatorsUtopianismUtopian SocialismKim Jong Il
Author:Peter Hitchens
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“I have quite a few of ‘my own’ people now,” Stalin concluded, “but the very first day of the war revealed a lack of proper organization and coordination among them. Worse still, among these ‘my own’ there are plenty of fools — and traitors lying low. This filth must be eliminated as quickly as possible, because a new system of power can be built only if I do not fear for my rear.” He turned back to the sheet of paper and wrote decisively: “Immediately neutralize all spies and potential enemies.” The General Secretary of the Communist Party raised his eyes to the ceiling. Images of former comrades — now exposed as traitors — flashed before his mind’s eye. Blood rushed to his face; beneath his habitual vigilance, rage began to surface. Yes, I too had erred for too long, following the lead of Leninist–Trotskyist lackeys who believed the revolution could be exported by financing foreign anti-imperialist movements. Through these empty talkers, colossal resources had vanished abroad like water into sand — resources that should have gone into armaments. And time? Years lost. Years that were desperately needed now. These double-dealers should have been destroyed immediately after Trotsky’s defeat — a barren breed capable only of parroting outdated ideas of long-dead leaders. At least now they were no longer underfoot, no longer pulling in opposite directions and tearing the system apart. “Stop,” Stalin ordered himself. “I must not descend into emotion. That is unacceptable. What matters is drawing conclusions from my own miscalculations.” — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: An internal monologue of Joseph Stalin during the first days of the German–Soviet War, a later and decisive phase of World War II. The passage reveals the core logic of Stalinist power: paranoia, purges, and the conviction that absolute control — rather than human life — is the true foundation of victory. It exposes how fear, repression, and ideological obsession shaped decision-making at the highest levels of the Soviet state.”

TyrannyHistorical FictionWorld War IiTotalitarianismAbuse Of PowerPower And ControlStalinismStalinPolitical PsychologyUssr History
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга перша. Перші кроки до світла та назад: Дитинство та занурення в ГУЛАГ.
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“In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.”

LeaderTotalitarianismHitlerPower StruggleStalinLeadership QualitiesTrotsky1966
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Our Younger Stalins cabinet stands in the corner. It holds photographs of our vozhd taken ten to twenty years ago. When possible, we substitute a Younger Stalin for current ones. It's essential we convey to the people the youthful vigor of their elder statesman. The longer we do it, the further back in time we must go to find new material. Readers of certain periodicals may worry that he is growing younger with each passing year; by his seventieth birthday he will be a slender-faced adolescent.”

CommunismCensorshipStalinPhotoshop
Book:The Tsar of Love and Techno
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“In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.”

SocialismCommunismUssrStalinLeninSovietsCollectvization
Book:Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance
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“Stalin perceived the world in stark black and white. In the same way, he divided people, nations, actions, and ideas into only two absolute categories: “ours” and “theirs.” “Ours” were all those — and everything — that, at the moment of decision, fell under his control or contributed to strengthening it. “Theirs” were everyone else, and everything else. He saw his role as a strategist in constructing a system of power that would force each of the “ours,” individually and collectively, to work at the very limit of human endurance in order to fulfill his strategic design. That design was simple and ruthless: to endlessly increase the number and strength of the “ours” by coercing the “theirs” into becoming “ours,” while simultaneously destroying — or, as a last resort, neutralizing — all who refused to submit. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: This passage reflects the ideological logic of Stalinist totalitarianism, where power was built on absolute division, forced loyalty, and systematic repression. In the Soviet worldview of the 1930s–1940s, survival depended on belonging to “ours” — or being destroyed as “theirs.”

PowerHistorical FictionDictatorshipSoviet UnionTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismStalinismStalinStalin EraPolitical Repression
Book:Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно
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“La cosa ya estaba muy consolidada en los ambientes de la izquierda desde que Stalin instruyera a sus hordas para que cuando debatiesen con un conservador le llamasen fascista y así este tuviera que emplear parte de su tiempo y de sus palabras en desembarazarse de tan pesada etiqueta. La táctica dichosa está muy extendida en España desde los años treinta y cobró renovados furores con la llegada de la democracia en 1978. Desde entonces, la izquierda y los separatistas mantienen inmovilizada y acomplejada a la derecha española, que en cuanto osa defender una sola de sus posiciones es inmediatamente situada en el averno del fascismo y de la ultraderecha.”

PoliticsHistoryFascismSpainConservatismPolitical CorrectnessLeftismStalinPolitically Incorrect
Author:Santiago Abascal Conde
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“But the subordination must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited, of all the toilers, i.e., to the proletariat. Measures must be taken at once, overnight, to substitute for the specific methods of "official administration" by state officials the simple functions of "workmen and managers," functions which are already fully within the capacity of the average city dweller and can well be performed for "workmen's wages.”

WorkersSocialismCommunismStalinVanguard
Book:The State and Revolution
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“…a medida que la lucha por recursos cada vez menores se recrudezca, estas dictaduras nacionales tenderán a convertirse en más y más opresivas en sus países y más cruelmente competitivas en el exterior.”

CubaCastroMaoSocialismoComunismoStalinChavismoTiranía
Book:Si mi biblioteca ardiera esta noche. Ensayos sobre arte, música, literatura y otras drogas
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“Se puede trasladar a una persona una fábrica, pero no se la puede obligar a pensar y a tener buenas ideas amenazándolas con la muerte.”

CubaSocialismoComunismoStalinTiraniaFidel CastroUnion SovieticaCorea Del Norte
Book:Por Que Fracasan los Paises( Los Origenes del Poder la Prosperidad y la Pobreza = Why Nations Fail)[SPA-POR QUE FRACASAN LOS PAISE][Spanish Edition][Paperback]
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“In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.”

NationalismUssrStalinLeninCentral AsiaUzbekistanNational Question
Book:Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia
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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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