Anatoly Chubais Quotes

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

In the early days of the Russian Revolution in 1917, I was completely in sympathy with it. I felt that it established a new era in the history of the modern world. I was so overwhelmed by it that, if people made any unfriendly comment, I would vigorously defend it. If people condemned the Communist party, I would speak in its defense.

It's a bit of a history lesson, being an actor. I was in 'Burnt By The Sun' at the National, which was set in Stalinist Russia, so I discovered all about that. You learn so much as you go along.

No one has murdered more communists than the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin

Without a tutor to help me in the study of Marxism-Leninism, I was no more than a theorist and, of course, had total confidence in the Soviet Union.

[Vladimir] Lenin died in January, 1924; three months later [Joseph] Stalin expounded in writing Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.

I ALWAYS LIKED MR STALIN.

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.

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

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

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

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

Were it not for Khrushchev’s execution of Stalin we wouldn’t have come to such a sorry state. Since then, we have lived increasingly useless and dirtier lives; this murder of Stalin was also the murder of his people. The country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has run into the ground.

Not counting the 26.5 million Russians who died in WWII, 20 million Russians were killed by the Stalinist regimes….the Stalinist regeme is still an open wound that the country can’t close.

Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country: it's painful to begin with, but afterwards everything turns out just fine.

We must accept that the phase of social development which began with the October Revolution has exhausted its driving force.

In the Soviet Union those who once extolled Stalin to the skies have now in one sweep condemned him to purgatory … Stalin’s mistakes amounted to only 30 percent of the whole and his achievement to 70 percent. On balance he was a great Marxist.

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'

I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.

Can and must! The proclamation of this new conception of [Joseph Stalin] is closed by the same words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution." In the course of a single year Stalin ascribed to [Vladimir] Lenin two directly opposed conceptions of the fundamental question of socialism. The first version represents the real tradition of the party; the second took shape in Stalin's mind only after the death of Lenin, in the course of the struggle against "Trotskyism".

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.

The Cuban economy is a disaster. No, I do not praise Fidel Castro.

The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.