Quotes About The Russian Revolution

#1. [Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#2. The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary.

Karl Liebknecht

#3. The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.

Kathryn Harrison

#4. Vladimir Putin had once been known as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula. And that he had also, in fact, been Grigori Rasputin before the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Jeff Kirvin

#5. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of the Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews

Winston Churchill

#6. The Russian people are suffering from economic fatigue and from disillusionment with the Allies! The world thinks the Russian Revolution is at an end. Do not be mistaken. The Russian Revolution is just beginning.

Alexander Kerensky

#7. Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International.

James P. Cannon

#8. My impressions of the Russian Revolution can be divided into two periods. The first period was when I showed deep sympathy. My second period is one of disappointment. This change was the result of close observation on the spot.

Chiang Kai-shek

#9. For the first time in world history the peasant was destined to find a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole, difference between the Russian Revolution and all those preceding it. In

Leon Trotsky

#10. I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

Howard Fast

#11. My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.

Tom Stoppard

#12. Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.

Tariq Ali

#13. My grandfather had come over as a member of the czarist army, to make an arms deal with the British government. Being a blinkered military man, he was unaware that the Russian Revolution was about to take place.

Helen Mirren

#14. 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

#15. The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.

Whittaker Chambers

#16. It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens.

Sarah Miller

#17. 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

#18. So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

Harold Brodkey

#19. Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.

Sarah Miller

#20. The revolution does not need historians.

Vladimir Lenin

#21. I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

George Orwell

#22. 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

#23. We should be used to it," Tatiana reasons. "There have always been lines separating us from the rest of the world, whether they were satin ribbons or iron rails.

Sarah Miller

#24. We live without power of law, like flocks of ravens
they come and sweep over the land.

Alexander Pushkin

#25. For virtually all the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, it was not a crisis of the capitalist system, but imperialist war that pushed old orders into crisis...

S.A. Smith

#26. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward.

Orlando Figes

#27. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

Vladimir Lenin

#28. If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin")

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#29. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them.

Orlando Figes

#30. Some men say get them crying on your shoulder and you have the sheets half-unfurled already. Other fellows say get them laughing. I say get them drunk. I ordered up more Riesling ...

Stewart Hennessey

#31. 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