“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

“Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also - and this was the highest proof of his greatness - he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that: he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“The formation of Stalin’s character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.”
― William Giraldi

“Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“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, Young Stalin

“Once in power, Stalin’s campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all—particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“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

“Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

“In spite of everything, all the POWs except for the Russians were receiving food parcels and medication from the International Red Cross. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from that organisation. Stalin said then: “There are no POWs of ours – there are traitors…”
― Anna Timofeeva-Egorova, Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45

“Tiffany learned that Lin had stolen Tiffany’s book title idea: “2 girls 1 cup.” A month ago, Tiffany had confided to Lin about Tiffany’s research showing that there was nothing on Amazon with the title “2 girls 1 cup,” and Tiff intended to be the first one to use that title for her upcoming book. Lin had betrayed her. Now, Lin’s book was available online and it was on the bestsellers list.
Tiffany’s first go-to move for revenge against any of her female friends was to go sleep with her BFF’s boyfriend. That was “Dr. Bob” as Lin called him affectionately (he was Lin’s drug source).”
― Lin Xun, 2 Girls 1 Cup

“...we made all the necessary rhetorical changes to make it look like we were aligning ourselves with a burgeoning democracy...”
― John J. Mearsheimer

“Neither Italian fascism nor German National-"Socialism" has anything in common with such a [Soviet socialistic] society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.”
― Joseph Stalin

“In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated.

This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker.

Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.”
― Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

“We didn't do a good enough job to make sure something like the Second World War could never happen again. We only looked at one side of the story. There were two monsters, Hitler and Stalin, and the regimes behind them, but in Nurmberg only the Nazis were tried. There was no justice for the Soviet regime.”
― Victoria Amelina

“The discomfort provoked is what makes this poem so important. Placing that event (the barbaric treatment of the family of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939) beside the idealisation of Stalin in MacLean's poem sets all sorts of crucial questions resonating. It raises the hugely disturbing question of the prolonged support offered by writers and intellectuals in the West for a regime characterised by an appalling degree of criminality systematically applied. The fact that Stalin's armies defeated Hitler's does nothing to change the nature of the regime he headed. Within four years of writing 'An Cuilithionn', MacLean became totally alienated from his poem for these very reasons. It would be wonderful if they made it a bad poem, but they don't. You can write splendid poetry in support of a mistaken political cause. MacLean was not the only one to get it wrong - far from it.”
― Christopher Whyte

“Chernivtsi's history renders foolish the idea that multiculturalism was new to European history; the ethnically cleansed straight-line borders such as the Oder-Neisse Line or the Curzon Line were the real innovations. They were there because of the escalation in hatred and violence in mid 20th-century Europe that had resulted in catastrophe. Different peoples have lived together - not always comfortably, of course - for longer than they have lived apart. A living continent is constantly changing, as Friedrich Naumann imagined his Mitteleuropa pullulating with life; the rigid, sterile classifications that Hitler and Stalin imposed on Europe and with which we lived for decades are deadly as well as boring.”
― Lewis Baston, Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told from the Edges

“In absolute numbers of people killed, the quarter century of tyranny (1929–53) of Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) over the Soviet Union ranks as the second deadliest regime in history, after that of his disciple Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who was responsible for even more deaths in Communist China between 1949 and 1976.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“Today any serious student will agree that the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin is first and foremost testimony to human resilience.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“Having tolerated religion somewhat in the 1920s, Stalin's new socialist society would no longer abide Christianity or Islam.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“In the course of the First Five-Year Plan, production aims were upped to impossible heights. The result was chaotic, and many of the local political leaders, factory bosses, planners, engineers, foremen, and even shop floor workers developed ways to exaggerate their accomplishments.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“Altogether, the lives of Stalin's subjects unfolded against the background of twenty-five years of almost relentless deaths of "unnatural causes"; for most, at some point during this quarter century, this background became foreground, when they themselves or their relatives and friends were swept up in this maelstrom.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union