Anatoly Lunacharsky Quotes

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

Here we were, corrupting all those Russians toward communism.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

Nothing can excuse the cruelties of Communist Russia, though in the East torture does not provoke revolt as it would in the West.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

We only need one, in the same way that Lenin only needed one.

Generalissimo of the Forces for the Suppression of Communism

The Spanish Lenin

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 only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all.

… 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.

Speech has never defeated fascism.

Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar - and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else.

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

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn't it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.