Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak administrative regions must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us the "final decisive battle" against the kulaks. We need to set an example. You need to hang (most definitely hang, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, the bloodsuckers. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this. Yours, Lenin…. P.S. Find some of the tougher people for this.

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development- and it is terrible now.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

The Russian Bolsheviks sold out most of the hopes of us early communists. The standard of living increased, and education and medicine improved finally after the 1917 Revolution, but the Russians today have as little freedom as we had under the Czar. That is the tragedy of Russia.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

I am a communist and a worker, and I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.

For the Russian masses, the proletarians, knew for certain, and already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes, that the peasants would soon be on their side.

Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.

...instantly introduce mass terror, shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted...You must act at full stretch: mass searches. Executions for possession of weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and unreliable elements.

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

A new Russian Revolution is inevitable, and that it may come much sooner than anyone would now dare to hope… I do not believe it possible that the thirst for freedom and decency in the countries of the Soviet Empire can remain much longer unslaked, and that any attempt either to quench it by total repression or to satisfy it by real reforms, will be cataclysmically destructive of the eroded foundations of the entire State system.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

We should be artistic in causing harm to them [dissidents.]

All oppressing classes of every description need two social functions to safeguard their domination: the function of a hangman and the function of a priest. The hangman is to quell the protest ... the priest reconciles them to class domination, weans them away from revolutionary actions.

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I have sent you 18,000 enemies of the people.

Harmony? No! Class war! Hatred to the death for the criminal bourgeoisie!

In November, 1919, in Western Russia, the peasants would sell me nothing for money, whereas my neighbor in the train bought all he wanted in exchange for small quantities of salt.

The Constituent Assembly sets for itself as a fundamental task the suppression of all forms of exploitation of man by man and the complete abolition of class distinctions in society. It aims to crush unmercifully the exploiter, to reorganize society on a socialistic basis, and to bring about the triumph of Socialism throughout the world

The entire press of our propertied class speaks only by permission of the government, becoming silent at the slightest nod. At the present time the whole Russian press is prohibited by the Government not only from speaking on the labor question, but even to publish such words as “labor question” or “proletariat”. The working class only uses the free press it has itself created, regarding it as valuable enough to be worth risking imprisonment for.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

Tyrannicide: Tyranny is a crime.

All those against the revolution must disappear and quickly be executed.