Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.

We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

Only in the Fall of 1924 did [Joseph] Stalin discover that it is especially Russia, as distinguished from other countries, which can by its own forces build up a socialist society.

There's a myth that Roosevelt gave Stalin Eastern Europe. I was with Roosevelt every day at Yalta.

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

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

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

It can't work—for Lenin and Trotsky are both extremely unpopular.... Lenin ... will never be able to dominate the Russian people.

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

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler.

The Russian Revolution has demonstrated beyond doubt that the State idea, State Socialism, in all its manifestations ... is entirely and hopelessly bankrupt.

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

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

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

Did Stalin make mistakes? Of course he did. In so long a period filled with heroism, trials, struggle, triumphs, it is inevitable not only for Joseph Stalin personally but also for the leadership as a collective body to make mistakes. Which is the party and who is the leader that can claim to have made no mistakes in their work? When the existing leadership of the Soviet Union is criticized, the comrades of the Soviet leadership advise us to look ahead and let bygones be bygones, they tell us to avoid polemics, but when it comes to Stalin, they not only did not look ahead but they turned right round, completely backward, in order to track down only the weak spots in Stalin's work.

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.

I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.

Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.