Osip Mandelstam Quotes
Around him are the riffraff of thick-skinned party leaders. He plays off the half-humans with favours. Forging edict after edict as if they were horseshoes- Shoots some in the forehead, others in the chest, the eye, the groin. Everyday he has an execution -- for our Broadchested Georgian it's like picking raspberries
Mandelstam was later sent to a Soviet gulag for writing a poem denouncing Stalin. He died there.
Osip Mandelstam, ?-~1939, Russian Poet, Untitled Poem about Stalin, 1933
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Belafonte was on stage with Hugo Chavez, the autocratic president of Venezuela and a patent demagogue who constantly attacked Bush and the American government. Other than an entertainer who knows little about politics making an over the top attack on the president this quotation is ironic because he was at the time on the stage with and supporting one of the two most autocratic dictators of the Western Hemisphere—Hugo Chavez. In that context, the accusation was as absurd as it can get.
Mark Twain referring to and reflecting on his encounter with the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Aziz.
Even leading Soviet officials were critical of the Stalin era and Stalin’s brutal, dictatorial methods.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam and one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife.
