Russian Revolution Quotes

Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak administrative regions must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us the "final decisive battle" against the kulaks. We need to set an example. You need to hang (most definitely hang, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, the bloodsuckers. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this. Yours, Lenin…. P.S. Find some of the tougher people for this.

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

Cinema is the most important of all the arts for us.

The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelet of yours?

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.

I have seen the future, and it works.

The big successful Communist revolutions occurred in poor agrarian societies–Russia in 1917 and China in 1949–not in industrialized societies, as Marx had predicted.

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

Personally, I would have dealt with the Soviets as the de facto Government of Russia. So would President Wilson. But we both agreed that we could not carry to that extent our colleagues at the Congress [Versailles], nor the public opinion of our countries which was frightened by Bolshevik violence and feared its spread.

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

… if the proletariat is to achieve victory, all the workers, irrespective of nationality, must be united. Clearly, the demolition of national barriers and close unity between the Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and other proletarians is a necessary condition for the victory of the proletariat of all Russia.

We are revolutionists from head to foot; revolutionists we were; revolutionists we are; revolutionists we shall remain until the very end.

Comrades, the revolution is on.

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.

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

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.

1918-20 was an epoch of unremitting effort to communize peasant Russia. Storm centers were created in the villages in the form of Committees of the Poor; the well-to-do peasant was to be displaced by the ne'er-do-well and the rural proletariat. A socialistic system of agriculture, with Communes and Soviet farms as features of the plan, was finally to link up rural production with the nationalized industries of the cities. Most important of all, a confiscatory socialistic tax was established ….. The peasant was allowed to retain only a certain minimum of his crop and compelled to deliver the remainder to the state. This was to be his contribution to the Worker's Republic which was supposed to have given him "peace and land.” The scheme proved to be a complete failure.

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.

Tyler Kent was a horrible man. He was a rabid anti-communist who believed that the Jews had been behind the Russian Revolution.

There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.

The only thing the Socialist [Communist] party could do for the peasant--said the Bolsheviks--was to help organize the paid agricultural laborers.

The tsar [Nicholas II] is not treacherous but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions.

A war between Austria and Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Hapsburgs—or perhaps the overthrow of both.