Stalin Quotes

“...we're dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. ...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“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.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“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!”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also - and this was the highest proof of his greatness - he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that: he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois

“In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“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.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?

Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.

p. 158”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.

P. 41”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“...The strange thing, you know, is that Stalin openly admired Ivan the Terrible. Two leaders who were willing to crush and kill their own people-to do anything necessary- in order to consolidate their power...Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could live for five hundred years...or perhaps forever?”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Stalin's successes and failures must be not just re-studied; they have yet to be discovered and acknowledged.”
― Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied

“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'.”
― Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied

“Vi siete mai chiesti quanto vale una vita umana? Quella mattina la vita di mio fratello valeva un orologio da taschino.”
― Ruta Sepetys

“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.”
― Peter Hitchens

“Look at history: We know very well what happened to Christianity after the Church became powerful. It seems that the corruption of the clergy has usually been in direct proportion to the power of the Church at any given time. Some of the popes have actually been depraved. Islam didn't turn out any better. Twenty-four years after the Prophet's death his
son-in-law, the Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was killed by rebels, and this event was followed by power-struggles and violence among the Muslims
and a prolonged period of conflict within Islam. Nor does the later history of lslam indicate that it adhered to its ideals any better than Christianity did. The French Revolution was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, the Russian Revolution by that of Stalin. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the revolutionary ideals were progressively drained of their content until Mexico found itself under the dictatorship of a party that continued to call itself "revolutionary" without being so in reality.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

“Als sie Stalin kippten, das war klar,
War auch Lenin nicht mehr lang zu haben.”
― peter hacks, Diesem Vaterland nicht meine Knochen

“What they didn't understand was that the Soviet Union wasn't communism, certainly not as Marx envisioned it. Instead, it was best understood as the most extractive sort of capitalism in which all profits belonged to the state.”
― Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

“De machthebbers winkelen uit de geschiedenis zoals het hun uitkomt.”
― Pieter Waterdrinker, Tsjaikovskistraat 40: Een autobiografische vertelling uit Rusland

“Es war einmal ein Mann, der hieß Karl Wiktorowitsch Pauker. Er lebte in der Stadt Lemberg in Galizien. Er war Friseur, und es war ihm eine Freude, die Menschen nachzumachen. Wenn eine Frau die Haare sich frisieren oder ein Mann den Bart sich schneiden ließ, dann spielte er über den Spiegel nach, was der Kunde oder die
Kundin vor ihnen gesagt hatte. Oder er spielte nach, wie Bürgermeister Adam Kilar am Sonntagvormittag über den Marienplatz stolzierte. Oder wie der berühmte Gelehrte Salomon Buber mitten auf der Straße überprüfte, ob die Buben den Hals gewaschen hatten. Oder wie Enni Rappaport, das stadtbekannte Kräuterweiblein, am Markt die verwelkten Blättchen von ihren Sträußchen abzupfte und dabei schimpfend ihren Speichel verteilte.

Alle konnte er nachmachen, und niemand war ihm böse, wenn er von ihm nachgemacht wurde, denn er machte die Menschen im Nachmachen besser, als sie im Original waren.

Dann brach der Erste Weltkrieg aus, und Karl Wiktorowitsch Pauker wurde zur Armee eingezogen. An der Front machte er Freund und Feind nach und brachte Freude den einfachen Soldaten und den Offizieren. Er wurde gefangen genommen und nach Moskau verschleppt und nach dem Krieg von den Bolschewiki befreit - auf sein Wort hin, dass er sich ihnen anschließe, denn zu jener Zeit gab es wenig zu lachen, und das wenige kam von ihm. Nach dem Tod des Genossen Lenin wurde Karl Wiktorowitsch Pauker der Leibwächter von Josif Stalin.

Der Vater des Vaterlandes wollte den Friseur immer um sich haben, denn es gab immer noch nicht viel zu lachen, aber er lachte nun einmal gern, und Karl Wiktorowitsch sollte ihn zum Lachen bringen. Er schickte ihn zu den Prozessen und ließ sich nachspielen, wie Kamenew das Todesurteil aufgenommen hatte und wie Bucharin, wie Rykow, Radek, Pjatakow. Und Stalin lachte. Der Friseur machte nach, wie sich Sinowjew vor die Genossen des Erschießungskommandos auf den Boden geworfen, ihnen die Stiefel geküsst und wimmernd darum gebettelt habe, ihn mit seinem Freund Josif Wissarionowitsch telefonieren zu lassen, es könne sich doch nur um ein Missverständnis handeln, und wie er endlich Zuflucht genommen habe bei der alten jüdischen Klage Höre, Israel, unser Gott ist der einzige Gott ... Barukh Schern Kawod, Malkhutho le'Olam va'Ed! - Stalin sei vor Lachen fast erstickt, und Karl Wiktorowitsch habe Erste Hilfe leisten müssen mit Herzmassage und Mund-zu-Mund- Beatmung.

Aber dann kam alles heraus. Der Friseur, hieß es, plane heimlich Anschläge gegen hohe Herren der Partei und der Armee, er habe eine Technik des Witzes entwickelt, die nachweislich zum Totlachen führen könne. So leid es dem Vater des Vaterlandes tat, den Mann zu verlieren, der ihn in einer Zeit, in der es wenig zu lachen gab, zum Lachen gebracht hatte, unterschrieb er das Todesurteil gegen seinen Leibwächter und Narren.”
― Michael Köhlmeier, Die Abenteuer des Joel Spazierer

“On the pretext of "combating the personality cult", Khrushchev has defamed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system and thus in fact paved the way for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. In completely negating Stalin, he has in fact negated Marxism-Leninism which was upheld by Stalin and opened the floodgates for the revisionist deluge.”
― Mao Zedong, On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism

“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.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“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.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“This is the "only a madman" argument.
Whenever I hear it (and it's often trotted out in such debates), I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space