Vladimir Lenin Quotes


In the end a funeral requiem will be sung over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism. As long as capitalism remains we cannot live in peace. In the end one or the other will triumph.


Context

Vladimir Lenin


Citations

Nikolai Lenin, 1870-1924, Russian Communist Premier, Selected Works, VII

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

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This quotation illustrates White’s extreme naivety about Stalinist Russia. At the time the Soviet Union had been backing communist insurgencies blatantly in China, Greece, and Korea for example. Most historians agree that White passed classified information to the Russians. He was accused of being a Communist, but there was never any evidence of that. Some people believe that he was a spy for the Russians and committed espionage, but others disagree observing that White was very much his own man and felt that much information that was classified never should have been. White substituted his own judgment, it is believed, about what could be given to the Russians. He was an admirer of what Russian socialism had accomplished economically, educationally and medically since the 1917 revolution deposing the Czar. Russia had been a valuable military ally, which had taken the brunt of both military and civilian casualties in WWII. White’s economics were certainly not Marxist but very much Keynesian. He was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was accused of being a Communist which he denied (see {634907}). He died of a heart attack 3 days later.


This is an example of what made the Cold War so difficult. The Italian Communists had great misgivings about the Russian version of Communism that tended to abuse human rights and try and control other countries. However, when the Russian Communists were under world attacks by the West, as with their incursion into Hungary, he urged that all the Communists stick together and defend the Russians even for policies that they thought wrong. On the West side, the same thing occurred. The United States tolerated and supported a number of terribly oppressive dictatorships that were virulently anti-Communist. Polarization was the international norm.


This was only 6 years after the Russian Revolution. Communist Russia had extended its influence to much of the world without firing a shot. To many, communism looked like the future. The Russian inability to make communism work economically in the next 70 years destroyed most of its influence.


Wright, like so many idealists had been a communist before the reality about Stalin and Russia was public knowledge. He then became a virulent anti-Communist and appeared in many international gatherings of Black artists and intellectuals. However, he felt that the CIA funding of an organization called the American Society for African Culture was undermining his message and integrity.’


The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.


Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
  • Born: April 22, 1870
  • Died: January 21, 1924
  • Nationality: Russian
  • Profession: Revolutionary, Politician

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism.