Resources
https://www.history.com/topics/russia/russian-revolution
https://ww2db.com/country/Russia
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_blood_feud#:~:text=In%20the%20traditional%20Albanian%20culture,order%20to%20salvage%20one's%20honor.
Quotes
“The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were “a sort of military-religious order.” When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him “a devout knight of the proletariat.” Stalin’s “order of sword-bearers” resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages—and the Middle East.”
“Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.”
“If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.”
“But Stalin’s real fault lay in his raging overconfidence: he lacked the resources for this vast enterprise which, instead of capitalizing on his Moscow victory, handed Hitler the constellation of stunning victories that led to the ultimate crisis of Stalingrad.”
“The Party justified its “dictatorship” through purity of faith. Their Scriptures were the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, regarded as a “scientific” truth. Since ideology was so important, every leader had to be—or seem to be—an expert on Marxism-Leninism, so that these ruffians spent their weary nights studying, to improve their esoteric credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: “Polichka my darling . . . reading Marxist classics is very necessary . . . You must read some more of Lenin’s works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin’s . . . I so want to see you.”
“Party-mindedness” was “an almost mystical concept,” explained Kopelev. “The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life.” As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong—even though it’s wrong all the time.” Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.”
“He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman.”
“The only man to shake hands with Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Roosevelt and Churchill, Molotov was Stalin’s closest ally. Nicknamed “Stone-Arse” for his indefatigable work rate, Molotov liked to correct people ponderously
“Stalin personally controlled a ‘Soviet Hollywood’ through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs.”
“President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a chef at one of Stalin’s houses and revealed nothing to his grandson: ‘My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life.’ As a boy, he recalled bringing food to Rasputin. He then cooked for Lenin. He was clearly Russia’s most world-historical chef since he served Lenin, Stalin and the Mad Monk.”
“So much can be explained by the habitual clumsiness of totalitarian panic.”
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