Historians and Quotes for Russia

For an updated page of quotes:

Traces of Evil

Historians and quotes

for Russia

HISTORIANS

E.H.Carr- pro-Soviet, revolution was perfectly planned ‘coup d’etat’

Robert Daniels- Revolution was an ‘historical accident’

Marc Ferro- WWI was the main factor leading to revolution

Robert Conquest-Orthodox, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties

William Taubman- Nikita Khrushchev

Zbigniew Brzezinski- The Grand failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20^th century

Eric Hobsbawm- Marxist

George F. Kennan- orthodox, diplomacy,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- soviet social, Gulag Archipelago

Orlando Figes- People's Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924

Plakhanov wrote Society and the Political Struggle in 1897- first Russian Marxist book

Chris Reed- Bolshevik historian

John Reed: Ten Days That Shook the World

Ilyin- Zhenevsky, A.F. From the February Revolution to the October Revolution 1917

Rodzianko, M.V.: The Reign of Rasputin

Michael Lynch-a revisionist historian

Allan Wildman-Russian Army in War and Revolution

Sheila Fitzpatrick- Social historian, revisionist, Russia’s Twentieth Century in History and Historiography

Steve Philips- Stalin and Stalinism

Leon Trotsky- War and the International- Attacked Russian involvement in WWI, History of the Russian Revolution- attacking Stalin

Richard Pipes- orthodox, Three Whys of Russian revolution- describes evilness of Lenin, The Unknown Lenin

Robert Service- Comrades: A World History of Communism

Edvard Radzinsky- more pro-Stalinist, Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives

Dimitri Volkoganov- Stalinist, Stalin: Triumph and tragedy

Anne Applebaum- Gulag

QUOTES

Figes: “The Romanov dynasty presented to the world a brilliant image of monarchical power and opulence during its tercentenary.”

Simpson: "With revolutionary parties in confusion and revolutionary leaders absent, the March revolution was a spontaneous, unplanned event. The timing and the cause of its outbreak were unexpected, though quickly exploited by the masses in the city"

Lvov: "Soviet has power without authority, Provisional Government has authority without power"

Bolsheviks: “suppress all attempts of the bourgeoisie to return to power: and this is what is meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat”

Trotsky: “We have not organised the revolution to kill.”

Trotsky: “War is the instrument of policy.”

Stalin: “Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose it is independence? We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.”

Stalin: “USSR should overtake and outstrip the capitalist countries.” , “Socialism in one country”

Stalin: “I believe in one thing only, the power of the human will”

Stalin: “Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.”

E. H. Carr: “Trotsky was the great intellectual”

Anna Louise Strong: “Leon Trotsky remains the most popular man in the Soviet Republic. . . . Russia's best organizer . . . Trotsky is more popular throughout Russia not only than any other man but than the whole of the Central Committee”

Anna Louise Strong: Leon Trotsky -“built an army out of worse than nothing; out of demoralised deserters who had determined never to fight again”

Historians Chris Ward and Chris “Corin Rykov and Tomsky were too naïve and blinded by love of NEP”

Alec Nove- An Economic History of the USSR: "It remains true beyond question that the second Five-Year Plan period was one of impressive achievement."

Stalin after 1936 constitution: “Never before - no, really never - has the world ever seen elections so completely free, and so truly democratic! History has recorded no other example of the kind."

Robert Conquest: "Joseph Stalin gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled." He was nonetheless "a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century."

Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union,"

Richard Pipes- Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: "Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices. Murdering fellow Communists - he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. A man of meagre education, he had no other source of ideas."

Stalin’s foreign policy was called “cold blooded realism”

With Nazi-Soviet pact “Stalin gave the green light to aggression.” Stalin’s action lay in “believing that such a war would be a long drawn out affair rather than a ‘blitzkrieg’ victory for Germany.”-war with Western Allies.