Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

The collapse of Russia was the second great event of 1917.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

Now that the great revolution has come one feels that however intelligent Lenin may be he begins to fade beside the genius of Trotsky

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of the Russian bourgeoisie

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

The Russians as a people had no point of conflict with the Germans; the conflict came from their respective imperialistic policies. When the Russian people learned that imperialism was historically wrong, they set up a revolution in 1917 and overthrew imperialism at home. They then negotiated for peace separately with Germany.

It's hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don't know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently.

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

My impressions of the Russian Revolution can be divided into two periods. The first period was when I showed deep sympathy. My second period is one of disappointment. This change was the result of close observation on the spot.

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

Ten days that shook the world.

If the Kaiser does not abdicate the social revolution is inevitable. I do not want it—in fact I hate it like sin.

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

In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.

What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat.

Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.

I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.

Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution

If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut his head off.

Revolutions that cannot resist regicide—the French and the Russian come to mind—have a way of ending badly.

Of course we were communists. The Czar’s Secret Police and the newspapers said anyone who was against the Czar was a communist. So we were. Most of us revolutionaries in the early 1900s were young and had little idea of who Karl Marx was, much less his historical and economic theories. Communists wanted the people to be free and control the government and not the Czar. Today we call that democracy. Communism became something else in Russia..

The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organization and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.

Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.