Quotes & Sayings About Bolsheviks
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Top Bolsheviks Quotes

Party-mindedness" was "an almost mystical concept," explained Kopelev. "The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life." As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but "someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong - even though it's wrong all the time." Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: "We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut."2 Nadya — Simon Sebag Montefiore

You must remember that the political development of the masses proceeds not in a direct line, but in a complicated curve. And is not this, after all, the essential movement of every material process? Objective conditions were powerfully impelling the workers, soldiers and peasants toward the banners of the Bolsheviks, but the masses were entering upon this path in a state of struggle with their own past, with their yesterday's beliefs, and partly also with their beliefs of today. At a difficult turn, at a moment of failure and disappointment, the old prejudices not yet burnt out would flare up, and the enemy would naturally seize upon these as upon an anchor of
salvation. — Leon Trotsky

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors - and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932. — Adolf Hitler

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. — Eric Hobsbawm

The Russian Bolsheviks have discovered that truth does not matter so long as there is reiteration. They have no difficulty whatever in countering a fact by a lie which, if repeated often enough and loudly enough, becomes accepted by the people. — Winston Churchill

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

You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all. — Orlando Figes

History is made up of "moral" judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. — Saul D. Alinsky

The West doesn't have to love us. In fact, we should ask ourselves more often why people are so suspicious of us. After all, the West isn't a charity organization. How have we been perceived for centuries? As a huge, warlike realm ruled by despots - first by the czars and then Bolsheviks. Why should anyone have loved us? If we want to be accepted, we have to do something in return. And it's an art that we have yet to master. — Vladislav Surkov

No, that's not the style of these people,' explained Maxy. 'You shouldn't think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin's court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Wrangel pretended to combat the Bolsheviks, Bolshevism is Jewry. In order to retain the favor of the Jews holding the real power in England, France and the United States, Wrangel showed to the Jews signs of his submission to them. Thereafter the Russian masses abandoned Wrangel as a traitor or as a comedian. It is impossible simultaneously to be an auxiliary of the Jew and an enemy of the Bolsheviki who are Jews. Be it incoherence or treason, Wrangel deserved the same fate as Denikin and he got it. — Boris Brasol

Because the Bolsheviks, who were so intent upon recasting the future from a mold of their own making, would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered, or erased. Returning — Amor Towles

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. — Terry Eagleton

Men - ' said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says 'Bolsheviks' - as an earnest Communist says 'Capitalists!' - as a good housewife says 'Blackbeetles' - so did Miss Williams say 'Men! — Agatha Christie

I say we have not even had the decency to maintain the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us - our roads, our bridges, our wastewater systems, our sewer systems; by the way, those weren't Bolsheviks, those weren't socialists that built those things for us - much less build the infrastructure we need for the 21st century. — Michael Bennett

The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connections with the workers' districts. — Leon Trotsky

We're all Bolsheviks now," Izzie said blithely. "And at my table!" Hugh said and laughed. — Kate Atkinson

The Bolsheviks did not seize power; they picked it up. — Adam Ulam

The social model of the Bolsheviks failed, as will any model that denies individual rights, intellectual freedom, and freedom of competing political parties. Without these freedoms and rights, there is no motivation for people to work. Such a system cannot be sustained, especially in light of the technological revolution of the information era. — Mikhail Gorbachev

Bolsheviks create their own difficulties which they successfully overcame later. — Winston S. Churchill

As best as the Count could determine, the Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world's oldest problems in its newest nomenclature. If — Amor Towles

The Nazis knew they were doing wrong, so they hid everything; the Bolsheviks were convinced they were doing right, so they kept everything. Like it or not, you're a Russian historian, a searcher for lost souls, and in Russia the truth is always written not in ink, like in other places, but in innocent blood. These archives are as sacred as Golgotha. In the dry rustle of the files you can hear the crying of children, the shunting of trains, the echo of footsteps down to the cellars, the single shot of the Nagant pistol delivering the seven grams. The very paper smells of blood" (401). — Simon Montefiore

What kind of crops do they raise in the towns? Only Grand Dukes, Bolsheviks and drunkards! — Ernest Poole

We saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don't have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions. — Costa-Gavras

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed. — Tom Stoppard

Challenged by the surge of nationalisms in many parts of the former Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks showed a great deal of political skill and flexibility. Their apparent willingness to make significant concessions to the nationalities, in sharp contrast to the White forces' uncompromising dedication to a "one and indivisible Russia," was a contributing factor to their victory in the Civil War. — Per Anders Rudling

Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon's retreat to make the Ascension's bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time. — Amor Towles

It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational
order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those
of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a
frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness
of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen
like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again. — Hermann Hesse

Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. — Orlando Figes

The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were "a sort of military-religious order." When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him "a devout knight of the proletariat." Stalin's "order of sword-bearers" resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages - and the Middle East. They — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants. — Peter Hitchens

For the information of these "friends" who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the person of the bureaucracy it has brought forward, but only how a revolution is prepared,
how it develops, and how it conquers. A party is not for us a machine whose
sinlessness is to be defended by state measures of repression, but a complicated organism that like all living things develops in contradictions. — Leon Trotsky

There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. — George Orwell

The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party. — Vladimir Lenin

Sincerity is all that counts -- it's a widespread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can't all be right. — Tom Driberg

The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory. — Orlando Figes

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements - the animals that we call men - will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement. — Leon Trotsky

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Three's all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Stalin's hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin's character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin. — Vasily Grossman

This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or society, then we are utterly dependent upon the state. Governments that are too weak or discredited to act through their citizens are more likely to seek their ends by other means: by exhorting, cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them. The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state. — Tony Judt

NAZISM = "National Socialism"
BOLSHEVISM = "International Socialism"
One was collectivism based on economic class, the other collectivism based on race and ethnicity. They agreed on the socialist part, but disagreed on participants. — A.E. Samaan

Again in Russia, we find a tiny group of zealots - calling themselves "the majority" (Bolsheviks) - who planned to control everything from a central authority. Lenin wrote most of the "scientific" program for a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, which was then debated and modified by other communist leaders. Socialism had to be imposed from above, by educated elites. There would be no from-the-bottom-up modifications. — Ann Coulter

One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks. — Winston Churchill

Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that. — Jane Smiley

Practically all human literature deals with the present and the past; when literature tries to describe the future, it at once ceases to be human and ceases to be literature; and all the pictures which the Bolsheviks have so far given us of a future world constructed on the design of Lenin are so depressing that nobody would like to read about such a world, much less to live in it. — Francis Mccullagh

There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm. — Joseph Stalin

The Bolsheviks started not just on the killing of private property; they were trying to abolish money itself. — Anatoly Chubais

They are all negros. And the Fascists won't be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn't tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it's really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain? — Evelyn Waugh

The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began. — Orlando Figes

Why," Comrade Yono couldn't stop himself from asking, "do you care so much about those newspapers?" "Because the Russian Revolution would never have succeeded if the Bolsheviks hadn't had their newspaper. — Eka Kurniawan

When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies ... we had begun by making a mistake. Leniency towards such a power was a crime against the working classes. That soon became apparent ... — Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin