Purges Quotes

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

I have no enemies, father. I have had them all shot.

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

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.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

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.

We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.

Historians write favorably, you know, for example, about Stalin because he was doing big things.

Stalin is a shameful stain on our country's history.

For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed.

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late '80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

A sad day it was, and a repaying of blood with blood. For in the time of Oliver Cromwell, when several men were put to death by him, being hung, drawn and quartered for pretended treasons, I felt from the Lord God that their blood would be required; and I said as much then to several. And now, upon the King's return, several that had been against him were put to death, as the others that were for him had been before by Oliver. This was sad work, destroying people; contrary to the nature of Christians

We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a new unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity. … It is necessary to defeat socialism inexorably. We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaising Freemasons. … What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power, and that is what we demand

Cromwell is just as much of a bloody dictator as was Stalin.

The regime of bureaucratic strangulation, which expels its outspoken opponents and bludgeons the party into silence, has become an international phenomenon of the period …. A real struggle against it cannot be made without an understanding of its international scope. On this, as well as on the other principled questions, the fight of the proletarian Communist elements in all parties unites with the Bolshevik fight of the Russian Opposition under the leadership of Trotsky.

Russia has never recognized the crime of the Soviet regime. The crimes of the Stalin regime and the millions who died—There was no repentance.

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 prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

Pol Pot carried out through the years enormous purges against his own followers because of his paranoia.

Absolutely get rid of CIA agents from units and the territory of Cambodia.

Stalin was an equal opportunity murderer. He killed his own family—he killed his real enemies