Louis Fischer Quotes

Psychology and economics are Stalin's favorable winds. He is also the party 'boss.' But he is, in addition, the Soviet Union's most striking personality.

My father was a Party member and he was a pretty high rank military officer under the colonel, junior colonel, I don't know the term. He was a total Stalinist. A bit with a streak of anti-Semitism and very shrewd man, a very kind of nervous man.

Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.

But Fascism cannot continue in a modified form.

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

Russia is now a horrible picture with its revolutionary double nature. It lies there like a huge wreck on the shore, broken up by its revolution.

If you know anything, deny, deny, deny. I want to save Fascism.

These [Greek] colonels had been plotting for years and years. They were fascists. They fitted the classic definition of fascism, as represented by Mussolini in the 1920s: a corporate state uniting industry and unions, no parliament, trains running on time, heavy discipline and censorship … almost a classic fascist ideal.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

Stalin is a strong, ruthless revolutionist and therefore a very potential threat to future world conditions.

In 1917, with the Bolsheviks, you had intra-elite conversations about what the country should be doing. You had arguments. Under Stalin, you didn’t really. But then after Stalin, you started having those arguments again.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

There was a joke in Czechoslovakia: The Communist Party dance, it's one step forward, two steps backward, and everyone is still clapping.

I grew up with communism, and if you live through communism you don't love it.

Though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

The saddest country I went to was Romania, years ago, during Ceausescu's rule.

We tend to think about fascism in terms of the Second World War.