Modern History Quotes Y12

Tsar Nicolas quote regarding his right to rule

I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.

Tsar Nicolas quote regarding the autocracy

I will preserve the principle of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as my late father.

Peter Waldron quote regarding the 1905 Revolution

While the troubles of 1905 should have alerted the state apparatus to the deep crisis that faced it, the regime’s ability to come through the year relatively unscathed served to reassure the Tsar … that [he was] secure.

Abraham Ascher quote regarding the 1905 Revolution

Though aborted, the Revolution of 1905 left an enduring legacy: it initiated a process of political, economic, and social change that even now still has not run its course.

Quote from an unidentified soldier suffering from battle wounds in WW1, recorded by Mikhail Rodzianko

For God’s sake order them to dress our wounds, for five days we have not been attended to!

Trotsky quote regarding the cause of the February Revolution

To the question ‘Who led the February uprising?’ we can answer definitively enough: conscious and tempered workers educated in the main by the party of Lenin.

William Henry Chamberlain quote regarding the cause of the February Revolution

The collapse of the Russian autocracy … was one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time.

George Kennan quote stating that Tsarism couldn’t have survived

None of the consequences of [Russia’s various] deficiencies were in the process of any significant correction as the war approached.

Quote by striking workers in the Sormovo factory in 1918

The Soviet regime … promised to bring the workers socialism but has brought them empty factories and destitution.

Lenin quote regarding his support of worker and peasant anarchy

You are the power - do all you want to do, take all you want. We shall support you.

Sheila Fitzpatrick quote regarding the Kronstadt Revolt

… the worst blow to the new regime …

Lenin quote regarding the Kronstadt Revolt

This was the flash which lit up reality more than anything else.

Lenin quote regarding Stalin’s power

Comrade Stalin … has immeasureable power concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to [act] … with sufficient caution.

Christopher Read quote regarding Lenin’s unquestionable aura

It is important to note that, despite the divisions, Lenin’s line was eventually followed on all of these key questions.

John Westwood quote regarding Stalin’s rise to power

He did not need to [follow a long-term plan], he could stand back and watch his rivals dig their own graves, occasionally offering his spade to one or another of them.

Isaac Deutscher quote regarding Trotsky’s fall from power

No contemporary, and [Trotsky] least of all, saw in the Stalin of 1923 the menacing and towering figure he was to become.

Bukharin quote regarding Stalin’s ideology

[He] sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power … he changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of next.

Stalin quote, writing in Pravda regarding industrialisation in 1931

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.

Quote by German Diplomat Gustav Hilger regarding Russia

Russians aren’t used to anything but suffering and hardship.

Christopher Ward quote regarding the Five Year Plans

[By the end of the First Five Year Plan] no major targets had been reached, but there were some dramatic advances … the Soviet economy was fundamentally transformed.

Walter Duranty quote regarding the Five Year Plans

Men, women, and children, horses and other workers are left to die in order that the Five Year Plan shall at least succeed on paper.

Extract from the Ryutin platform

The most evil counter-revolutionary could not have carried out the work of destroying the party better than Stalin.

W.G. Krivitsky quote regarding the show trials

They sacrificed honour as well as life to defend the hated regime of Stalin, because it contained the last gleam of hope for [a] better world.

Quote from an NKVD member regarding execution quotas

I asked him … tell me honestly, how many people were executed in Georgia? I can tell you he said ‘80,000 … we overfulfilled our plan.’

Robert Conquest quote regarding Stalin’s reasoning behind the purges

The one fundamental drive that can be found throughout [The Terror] is the strengthening of [Stalin’s] own position … It led him to absolute power.

Roberta Manning quote regarding the reasons behind the Great Terror

The economic problems of 1936-41 and the Great Purges appear to be inexorably linked … when plans went awry, the subconscious temptation to seek scapegoats becomes inevitable.

John Steinbeck quote regarding the omnipresence of Stalin

[Stalin’s] portrait does not just hang in every museum but in a museum’s every room.

Beryl Williams quote regarding the state of women’s equality in the inter-war years

It was a macho world for all the talk of equality.

Lenin quote regarding the attacks on the Orthodox Church

The greater the number of representatives of the … reactionary clergy we will manage to execute in this affair, the better.

Shulgin quote regarding his opinions on education

An awful fart, a fart of the past.

Meyerhold quote regarding the state of Soviet cinema

Boring productions which are all so alike and differ only in their degree of worthlessness.