Robert Conquest Stalin Quotes

There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was a contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

Janusz Bardach’s memoir, Man Is Wolf to Man (co-written by Kathleen Gleeson, Scribner, 2003), offers a powerful portrait of trying to survive in the Gulags of Stalinist Russia. On that subject both Anne Applebaum’s Gulag (Penguin, 2004) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,’s The Gulag Archipelago (Harvil, 2003) have been essential reading. For general historical background I’ve found Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (Pimlico, 2002), Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin (Phoenix, 2004), and Shelia Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (Oxford University Press, 1999) extremely useful. Regarding Russian police procedure, Anthony Olcott’s Russian Pulp (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) went into detail not only about the justice system itself but also literary representations of that system. Boris Levytsky’s The Uses of Terror (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan Inc., 1972) was invaluable when it came to understanding, or at least trying to, the machinations of the MGB. Finally, Robert Cullen’s The Killer Department (Orion, 1993) provided a clear account of the real-life navigation into the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo.

Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin’s policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.

Stalin’s whole mode of being in the world militated against the renunciation of the idea of a new revolutionary period. The perspective of an ever-diminishing internal class struggle as the right way to socialism was totally alien to his makeup. Fighting, struggle and conquest were what he lived for as a Marxist and a Leninist. Socialism had always meant to him a gospel of class war and it still did, whatever Lenin might have said toward the end about civil peace and reformism.

He had given Bolshevism strong personal leadership without being a dictator who ruled by arbitrary command. The movement had arisen as his political following in Russian Marxism and developed for twenty years under his guidance and inspiration. Although not institutionalized in an office, his role of supreme leader had entered into the unwritten constitution of Bolshevism, its habitual modus operandi. Lenin had been the movement’s organizer, its chief strategist and tactician, the author of its distinctive version of Marxist ideology, and the authoritative interpreter of party doctrine. He had been the commander-in-chief of the party in the political struggles that led up to the revolutionary conquest of power, and in those that ensued after power was won. He had been the dominant policy-making personality of the ruling party and of the new Third International that came into being under its auspices. His unique authority enabled him to unify an extremely disputatious ruling group whose inner conflicts continually threatened to tear it apart into warring factions. As head of the Soviet government, moreover, Lenin was Bolshevism’s chief executive and director of its foreign relations.