Joseph Stalin Quotes
We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.
His definition of Russian territory included any area that the Czars claimed which included Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, the Caucuses, but at the time of the speech, Russia was fighting to keep its existing territory.
Joseph Stalin, 1879-1953, Russian Premier, Political Report, XVI Party Congress, June 29, 1930
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Arguing that the Arabs will never agree willingly to a Jewish state:
He was one of the first democratic politicians of Germany who argued for rapprochement between France and Germany and may have been the first to suggest a European Union. Most of the world was very distrustful of German nationalism, and Stresemann presented one of the positive aspects of it. He died of a stroke in 1929 and the political vacuum was eventually filled by Hitler and the Nazis as the Weimar Republic was short lived. As democratic as Stresemann was, he still was preoccupied with German territorial control. Germany’s aggression in WWI led to a peace treaty that fixed borders that were always contested by Germany. The German position was that if there was an area or France, Poland, or other country where there was a community of German speaking people, then that area should be a part of Germany. This was one of the main reasons for Germany’s aggression on WWII.
He was announcing the arrest of an agent of the Iranian Government who was plotting to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States.
The Turks held and then counterattacked defeating the Greek invaders soundly. The Greeks then retreated and evacuated Anatolia but in vengeance for their defeat, followed a scorched earth policy and committed many atrocities on the Turkish villages they passed through.
It was true that the majority of the citizens of Crimea in 2014 preferred to be a part of Russia than the Ukraine. So the Russians sized the Crimea, had an election and when the vast majority of the Crimeans voted for Russian affiliation, they annexed the Crimea under the principle of self-determination. However, Russia has two of its states with Muslim majorities that prefer to affiliate with one of the majority Muslim nations in the area. But the hypocrisy of the Russians became clear when they would not allow those two states to have elections. The Russian policy seemed to be that whatever is part of Russia is non-negotiable and not subject to self-determination, but whatever borders on Russia that is not part of Russia is entitled to an expression of self-determination and independence of other affiliation if they want. The Crimea had the only warm water port in the Soviet Union; they had a deal with the Ukrainians that their navy could use the port. However, they felt that Western support for the new Ukrainian government was the first step in ousting Russia from that port.
Hobson, like Mark Twain in America, was a major critic of imperialism.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 until 1953. He served as both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he ultimately consolidated power to become the Soviet Union's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalized these ideas as Marxism–Leninism while his own policies are known as Stalinism.